Home Start Finance Case Study

HomeStart Finance is South Australia’s leading provider of affordable home loans. Established by the South Australian Government in 1989, they have helped more than 56,000 households achieve their home ownership goals. HomeStart offer a unique range of home loans to help people overcome the obstacles to home ownership. This includes home loans that can boost what you can borrow while keeping repayments manageable.

HomeStart’s existing information environment could be described as transactional and paper based. This culture was influenced by the tool sets available to end users and a lack of consistent process review over a prolonged period of time. HomeStart had a need to implement an Electronic Document & Records Management System (eDRMS) solution that would meet its statutory requirements. They were keen to implement the solution on the Microsoft SharePoint platform given the platform’s extensive capabilities.

HomeStart engaged a Microsoft Information Management specialist for the delivery of the eDRMS solution. The partner provided HomeStart with an eDRMS solution based on Microsoft SharePoint and RecordPoint technology, as RecordPoint is the only fully Victorian Electronic Records Scheme (VERS) certified records management software solution available for SharePoint.

The solution delivered an eDRMS environment for all internal HomeStart end users. This included the enablement of SharePoint Search across network drives, and the design of all SharePoint and RecordPoint components for HomeStart’s corporate documents.

In using SharePoint, HomeStart can apply the same technology for the delivery of an Intranet solution that presents documents to users, while storing them in the eDRMS solution.

End users are now enabled to use SharePoint’s document management functionality with rules configured to interpret user input, and then classify documents with an appropriate retention policy.

The solution (delivered within budget over a six month period) enables business units to access vital business material while consistently applying security, retention and disposal to a larger portion of corporate information in an automated fashion. The eDRMS also has the capability to track and audit the movement of physical records across the organisation.

HomeStart’s eDRMS solution delivers stable, controlled and centralised document management, introducing corporate-wide information management policies, and providing support frameworks such as induction and exit procedures.

It has helped HomeStart leverage their existing investment in Microsoft technology and, in doing so, increased usability for users and gave them compliance with their statutory requirements.