Integrous helps historic Trust to save time and reduce costs

Integrous is working with the Birmingham-based housing charity Lench’s Trust to help improve their efficiency and reduce operational costs by developing a new database and workflow-driven application.

The Trust, originally established back in the 16th Century by William Lench, seeks to build bridges in the community and to promote the well-being of the elderly population of Birmingham by providing support and care to those in need. The Trust currently has three schemes of individual properties in the Moseley, Quinton and Sutton Coldfield areas of the City. Living in sheltered housing allows the residents to live independently with the security of having support and assistance available 24 hours a day.

Integrous were invited by Lench’s Trust Chief Executive Jean-Luc Priez to review their systems and processes for dealing with housing applications. Integrous Director of Projects, Biju Chudasama, summarised the nature of the issue: “They had an Access-based system developed for them which captured very minimal information on Applicants and Residents. The majority of the information would be captured on paper and stored in files and folders.”

Commenting on the high levels of tacit knowledge within the organisation, Biju added: “They also held very minimal information on their flats and schemes. Only people who knew the buildings and flats inside and out would know the difference between flat 1 and flat 56!”

These kinds of ‘information management’ issues are common, particularly in smaller organisations. Established manual processes remain embedded and the efficiencies and cost savings that can be enabled by improved use of IT systems are not understood.

At the Trust, tremendous administrative effort was required by the team to process new applicants. This was an 80% manual procedure which, due to the lean staffing, simply had to be improved.  Integrous’ aims were simply to ensure that the staff were provided with all the help possible from a new workflow-driven application.

Biju commented: “We believe we can increase process efficiency by 50%. We also believe we can enhance their operational processes by capturing all information in relation to the applicant, resident and all the processing that happens in-between. In summary, the new application that we are developing will provide a reduction in operational time and costs - capturing a lot more granular information on the applicant and also detailed information and historical information in regard to residents, flats and schemes.”

Commenting on the project, Lench’s Trust Chief Executive Jean-Luc Priez said: "We have had a very good experience working with Integrous. The project is progressing very nicely."

For further information on this project, or to find out how Integrous can save you time and reduce costs, call our project team on 08456 581 811

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