believe housing

Document Scanning | Data Migration Case Study

How Did Cleardata Help?

Background

The housing association believe housing provides services to around 18,000 properties throughout County Durham. They deal with everything from lettings to money matters, property maintenance and employability.

The organisation were moving and consolidating offices and discovered a large amount of paperwork that needed digitising.

They wanted to go digital to modernise the organisation, free up office space from an increasing amount of documentation and provide an agile working solution, which would allow staff to work flexibly. Another key driver was to improve the organisation’s records management compliance with GDPR legislation.

Cleardata interviewed believe housing’s Data Analytics Lead & Records and Data Right Lead and have pleasure in providing their customer experience and feedback, together with details of Cleardata’s services delivered.

Scanning Solution

Site visit to understand types of documentation and provide recommendations for scanning, indexing and digital data migration
Cleardata collected tenancy records and associated documentation, using tracked vehicles
Records tracked using barcode management, to provide a full audit trail
Any file retrieval requirements during scanning were handled using scan on demand, providing fast digital document delivery
Files were prepped for scanning, with all staples and paperclips removed. Documents were intelligently sorted to ensure a cost effective solution, with legacy records identified for shredding and archive
Documents were scanned in line with BS 10008: 2020, to ensure legal admissibility
Cleardata’s bureau is equipped with industry leading IBML Fusion and Kodak Scanning technology
All housing records, including tenancy paperwork indexed to ensure fast search and retrieval
Digitised files returned by secure SFTP for import into their Documotive document management system
Physical files securely archived for three months, then confidentially destroyed

Why they chose Cleardata

“What really appealed to us was their 2 x 100% scanning quality checking promise. It’s unrivalled, we looked at so many different providers, but it really helped us have confidence in the scanning service to know the digitised documents are correct. We came to visit Cleardata and seeing the quality of the scanning technology really gave us the confidence to choose them as a trusted partner. When we saw the quality of the digital documents returned it gave us further evidence that this was the right provider for us.”

What benefits have you seen from the scanning project?

“Wow, it’s really revolutionised how we work as a business. It’s moved us away from being stuck to paper sat in filing cabinets to living documents that people can rally get the best out of. It’s made it so much better for us to deal with legal cases and meant we’re able to work with subject access requests efficiently. It’s made a massive difference to how our business works, but also, it’s simplified how it works because everybody can find documents quickly and easily.”

Digital data migration project background

believe housing were founded when three separate landlords merged together into one. The previous organisations all worked differently, using different systems, so they had a need to transform around 2.5 million legacy digital documents, held on SharePoint, into a consistent format.

The organisation required the digital data to be labelled correctly to enable sorting and records retention, ensuring compliance with GDPR.

Automated digital data migration – Robocloud service

Consultancy was provided to assess existing digital records management, with recommendations for digital data migration
Automated data migration and processing delivered using Cleardata’s Robocloud, Robotic Process Automation Service
Existing digital records were modernised to provide a consistent records format
All records were OCR’d to provide users with the ability to search records
Unwanted files were removed, based on believe housing’s pre-established criteria to ensure GDPR compliance and free up costly digital storage space

Benefits of digital data migration

“We had a lot of documents on our record management system that were unstructured, so we needed to structure these and label them correctly. We also had blank documents that had unfortunately been scanned over from previous systems. Our digital documents are now in a consistent format and labelled correctly, so they’re really easy to find and staff don’t have to spend time searching through lots of information. They can just type it in and it comes up. The project has really improved our records retention and compliance.”

How have you found the experience working with cleardata?

“It’s been amazing, we chose Cleardata because their values match our values as a business and that’s what we were looking for. It’s become a real true partnership, it’s almost like we’re working as one business and has meant that we have got people that we can really trust. It’s been such a fascinating journey to go through with them.

“Just everything about it was so easy. I’ve never done records management before so it was really new to me, but just everyone I talked to, especially Jess, made everything so easy to understand. They had the expertise themselves to be able to point us in the right direction, so I could understand and learn as I was doing it as well. It was just so straight line, there were no issues or problems. It was just a perfect way to work together.”