Northamptonshire-based housing association, Greatwell Homes, has partnered with cloud and managed service provider, ANS Group to transform its internal operations and lay the foundations for agile working and improved digital communication.

As part of its four-year corporate plan and transformation strategy, Greatwell Homes, which serves over 4,500 homes across the Northamptonshire region, is migrating all of its on-site hardware to the cloud.

This partnership will see ANS deploy Office 365 and Microsoft Azure across Greatwell Homes’ key systems, helping to decrease costs associated with the management of on-site hardware, as well as boosting flexibility and efficiency to enhance customer service.

This efficiency in digital communications will allow staff to be more flexible and work more closely with customers and communities. It will also help the organisation to better manage the homes and services it provides and focus on developing a more diverse range of new homes to meet local needs and value-for-money services.

Following this initial phase, ANS will roll out a backup service as well as provide ongoing support from its dedicated teams, allowing Greatwell Homes to focus on developing its services for the communities it works with. The housing association is also moving towards implementing new technologies, which will help to provide deeper insight into the needs of the community and boost digital engagement.

Loreen Herzig, head of IT and business improvement at Greatwell Homes: “We are delighted to be working in partnership with ANS as we are laying the foundations that allow us to work in more flexible and smarter ways to serve our communities. This is an exciting time for Greatwell Homes as we are launching our new Corporate Plan 2019 – 2022. Our customers will really see a difference in how we provide services and communicate with them by offering more digital options of engagement, as well as being more visible in their communities.”

Andy Barrow, CTO at ANS: “Customers and communities are at the heart of everything that Greatwell do, and its dedication to ensuring that this service remains agile and optimised through technology should serve as an example to the sector as a whole.

“We are looking forward to seeing the Greatwell team evolve over the next four years as we provide them with the foundations needed to deliver on their strategy to become more digital and efficient, and continue to make positive difference to the communities that they work with.”

Phil Riley, Independent Consultant at S.Tel Consultants assisted Greatwell Homes with the options appraisal, requirements specification and tender evaluation process.  Phil said that “Greatwell Homes has chosen an innovative public-cloud based solution which will provide the agility to meet current and future demands of both staff and customers.  This state-of-the-art solution creates the technical flexibility and demonstrates ongoing value for money allowing the organisation to have the ability to be at the forefront of service delivery and customer care as services and business processes become increasingly digital.”