Bron Afon Community Housing in South Wales has revolutionised the production of its monthly ‘board packs’ using web-based Virtualboardroom software from Perivan.
Bron Afon holds monthly board, staffing and audit committee meetings; for the main board meetings, the 150-page board pack has to be distributed to 55 people. In the past, each document in the board pack had to be printed individually. Not only did this monopolise Bron Afon’s key printers for 24 hours each month, the manual collation and binding process took the company secretary five hours per month for each committee.
Virtualboardroom is a web-based board portal which allows company secretaries and administrators to communicate with their directors, exchange confidential documentation and compile board packs. Using the Boardpack production tool in Virtualboardroom, the task of collating monthly board packs is faster and simpler and also gets rid of the logistical, environmental and storage issues of creating board packs the traditional way.
Having come across Virtualboardroom via the National Housing Federation, Bron Afon signed up for Perivan’s hosted solution and went on to outsource the printing of the board packs to a local ‘green’ printer. Bron Afon’s Virtualboardroom went live within two days of signing the contract and staff were given on-site training in the same week.
The time taken to produce Bron Afon’s board packs has been reduced from five hours to just 15 minutes per committee each month and over the next year, Bron Afon expects to save £5,000 due to the streamlined production process.
Board members can now view their board packs online, no matter where they are, reducing printing costs and the need to transport heavy documents. Bron Afon also expects that new devices already compatible with Virtualboardroom, such as iPads, smart phones and other tablet computers, will become increasingly popular with board members.
Gwyn Lloyd, governance support officer, Bron Afon Community Housing, said, “Ever thought you needed extra days in a month? We get that from Virtualboardroom. Not only has it improved the look of our board papers, it’s saving us the equivalent of a month’s worth of work every year. Having the papers printed externally both saves us money and ticks our environmental boxes.”
