Broxbourne Housing Association is the largest supplier of social housing in the borough of Broxbourne. Their aim is to be an excellent Housing Association that provides high quality affordable homes. Broxbourne are a not for profit Housing Association who own and manage over 3,600 homes in and around the Broxbourne borough.

Broxbourne were finding their paper based business processes slow and time consuming. Internal and external communication was somewhat fragmented with the majority of this being conducted via email. With 120 users across the organisation, Broxbourne needed a solution that could connect staff across the group.

Three areas were identified for improvement:-

• Paper processes needed to be automated
• There was a need for a central communications tool
• A more efficient way of managing documents.

Broxbourne decided that the best option for them would be to implement an intranet. After careful consideration, Broxbourne selected SORCE to be their intranet solution provider.

SORCE were chosen for the following reasons:-

• Flexible applications
• An active user community
• A wealth of experience in the housing sector

The SORCE solution offered standard applications such as Document Management with the added flexibility to tailor applications to Broxbourne’s own business requirements. Broxbourne also liked the fact that SORCE have an active user community – this could enable them to see what other companies were doing with the product and give them some ideas for creating their own applications. Broxbourne felt reassured by SORCE’s extensive experience implementing intranets in housing as well as many other business sectors.

The new intranet, called “IAN” (Information And News), a name chosen by employees is designed to encourage interaction and communication between employees. Initially a communications tool, “IAN” is used for publishing news articles, and bulletins. An active social page has also been created to encourage staff interaction. Remote workers such as scheme managers also now have access to the new intranet.

Adrian Parker, IT Manager at Broxbourne Housing said, “We were looking for an intranet solution which would bring together everything we do and help employees communicate and share information more easily. We have worked closely with SORCE to achieve these goals and have been delighted with the results.”

Now that communications across the group have improved dramatically, Broxbourne’s future plans are to introduce automated business processes, such as using event manager, to book rooms and resources.