The Bernicia Group has completed the implementation of a number of new systems from Orchard, based on the software provider’s Vestri web platform. The new systems cover Bernicia’s internal and external web presence, performance management and collaboration.
Orchard Content Management is being used for two external websites for Bernicia Group and its leasehold management company, Kingston Property Services, as well as an intranet and extranet, all of which have been configured using Bernicia’s internal resources, resulting in considerable savings over its previous externally-developed sites.
Bernicia is using Orchard Collaboration Management to help manage policies and procedures across the group. Staff can now find the most current version of a document, while those responsible for policy review have a full audit log of access and version control, combined with access permissions to control who can review or see particular documents.
Samantha Pile, governance manager, Bernicia Group, said, “As a group with multiple sites, including remote schemes, staff need to be able to access our policies and procedures quickly and efficiently. As Orchard Collaboration Management is hosted externally, staff can easily log in and access any policy or procedure they need without having to use complicated share-drive systems.
“The policy and procedure workspace also enables the efficient dissemination of new policy documents to staff, and the maintenance of an audit trail showing when policies were uploaded, changed or deleted which has proved useful during many internal audits.”
Bernicia has standardised its presentation of key performance indicators with Orchard Performance Management; in the past, data was submitted in a variety of formats which then needed to be collated. End-users can now input their data directly into the final print/online format, with clear graphics helping committee members and senior managers to quickly digest the KPIs with respect to their targets.
Bernicia has also recently worked with Orchard to develop a staff location tool, replacing a reliance on Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes. The new intranet-based tool enables everyone to see each other’s location and makes it easier to manage the health and safety of field-based workers as well as recording out of office locations.
In future, Bernicia plans to add a diagnostic tool to its website so that residents can accurately log their own repairs and a secure payments facility for its leasehold customers. The housing provider also wants to develop links from the KPIs in the performance management tool to other SQL tables in its housing management and CRM databases, saving time by removing the need for KPIs to be extracted manually. The final item on Bernicia’s planned work schedule is to enable committee members to countersign high-value invoices, using Adobe’s signature functionality combined with Vestri’s secure environment and audit trail.
