Thirteen Group is a landlord and housing developer that provide homes for rent and sale. They manage 34,000 properties for more than 70,000 customers across Teesside, North Yorkshire, County Durham, and Tyne and Wear.
We are thrilled to have been Thirteen's chosen technology partner for several digital transformation projects over the years, helping them find more efficient, modern and less expensive ways of working.
| THE CHALLENGE
Analogue working
Every one of Thirteen's properties has a substantial amount of associated documents. Thirteen's agents need fast access to these documents to deliver an outstanding customer experience, so they must be stored and managed efficiently. But that wasn't happening consistently.
Thirteen's property management process was mostly analogue, relying on agents manually processing paper documents and individually importing them into an SQL database. This caused two problems:
Time
Having to scan, save and label each document individually was a 6-step process that took Thirteen's agents a long time, giving them less time to focus on customer care.
Errors
Importing stacks of documents each day was forcing Thirteen's agents to do something that people are proven to be bad at; staying alert while performing a tedious, repetitive task. This caused 'human error' mistakes while importing documents, making it difficult for other agents to find customer information quickly.
With their legacy document management system reaching end-of-life support, Thirteen recognised an opportunity to save time and costs by working more efficiently. As digital transformation specialists and a trusted technology partner to Thirteen Group for years, we were thrilled to help them with this project.
| THE SOLUTION
Microsoft SharePoint and Power Automate
To support Thirteen's new, modern approaches to work, we proposed the development of a robust digital workplace to simplify the access and storage of essential documents.
As a Gold Microsoft Partner, we know how powerful Microsoft SharePoint and Power Automate are and how perfect a solution they could be for Thirteen's challenges.
Once we'd presented these benefits, Thirteen signed off on our solution and the project started.
The benefits of our solution:
| THE DELIVERY
Automation
After our Workplace Technology Specialist finished building the custom SharePoint environment, Thirteen’s focus was to export the hundreds of thousands of documents from their legacy database and import them into SharePoint.
After starting, Thirteen quickly found that 75,000 documents had been mislabelled in the legacy database. Missing essential information, they couldn't transfer these documents into the new SharePoint system. The only solution was to update each document manually. Although it would only take 2 minutes to update each record with a correct label, this would add up to 300+ full working days of effort to fix completely.
To solve the issue, our Workplace Solutions Expert built a custom automation workflow. Through Robotic Process Automation, this bot pulls every item of information needed to correctly label each document and places it next to each record to speed up the process.
https://boxxe.com/robotic-process-automation-rpa-explained
Using this tool, Thirteen's agents were able to correctly label each document in 20 seconds instead of 2 minutes, saving Thirteen roughly 250 working days.
With the documents currently being updated, Thirteen will soon complete their migration to Microsoft SharePoint and be set to deliver an even more outstanding service for their customers!
Power Automate: What is it?
Power Automate is a Microsoft service which can be purchased as part of a Microsoft 365 or Dynamics 365 plan. With it, you can create automated workflows using prebuilt templates or by recording your own actions.
Why choose boxxe?
With 25+ years of commercial Microsoft experience, we offer industry-leading support at every stage of the Microsoft lifecycle.
We've partnered with Microsoft and Automation Anywhere to make RPA solutions like Power Automate easier than ever to adopt.
Get started with a free Workplace Assessment
Contact us below for details or read more about our award-winning services in our Workplace Hub.
Thirteen Group - Microsoft Sharepoint and Power Automate
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RPA for Corporate Services
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