Metropolitan Housing Partnership Moves to Cloud to Reduce Risk and Improve Stability, Performance, and Flexibility
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Metropolitan Housing Partnership Moves to Cloud to Reduce Risk and Improve Stability, Performance, and Flexibility

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Metropolitan Housing Partnership (MHP) is a network of locally focused member organizations working together to provide housing, regeneration, community care, and support services to more than 80,000 customers. Its member organizations manage more than 35,000 affordable homes for rent and sale in London, Cambridgeshire, the Midlands, and South Yorkshire. MHP is one of the top 15 largest housing partnerships in the United Kingdom.

MHP wanted to benefit from the latest Oracle E-Business Suite applications to cut customizations and interfaces, and to outsource the management of its entire technology environment.

Using Oracle On Demand and Oracle Technology On Demand, MHP has been able to cut risk and complexity, strengthen change control while building a scalable platform for future growth, and reduce cost of ownership in the longer term.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Metropolitan Housing Partnership

  • “We evaluated several hosting providers, but Oracle’s consultative approach and ability to manage our entire technology stack on a single platform, combined with the outstanding levels of support and guidance we received at every stage, made Oracle the obvious choice.” – Patrick Walsh, IT Director, Metropolitan Housing Partnership

  • Consolidate Oracle and in-house developed solutions in addition to specialist property, rental, and tenant management systems on a single technology platform to improve stability and performance, reduce risk, enforce proper change control governance, and cut system maintenance and support costs
  • Minimize the customizations, workarounds, and manual processes needed to manage value-added tax (VAT) amounts levied on rental income, repairs, routine maintenance, and other ancillary expenditures related to the housing sector
  • Free up internal IT resources to reduce time for patching and upgrades
  • Gain the ability to rapidly scale the infrastructure up or down, in line with changing business needs; launch new functionality whenever required by users or customers; and incorporate changes in government regulations pertaining to the housing sector

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Implemented Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12, replacing the organization’s legacy Oracle E-Business Suite environment, to consolidate business processes and standardize on a single suite of up-to-date, best-practice financial, human resources, and procurement applications running in a single Oracle Database environment
  • Switched from on-premise management to Oracle On Demand to benefit from the unrivaled stability, availability, scalability, and flexibility offered by an integrated, vendor-managed suite of solutions built on Oracle’s hardware stack
  • Chose Oracle Technology on Demand to outsource the hosting of nonOracle applications to Oracle’s managed environment and extend the speed and efficiency of virtual, agile, cloud-based computing across MHP’s entire infrastructure
  • Benefited from new capabilities in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 to enhance subledger functionality and automate managing the various VAT levies, which helped cut process cycle times, eliminate customizations, and reduce the number of interfaces required
  • Supplemented  instructor-led user training for Oracle and nonOracle applications with an online learning environment and suite of training tools built using Oracle User Productivity Kit, set to deliver long-term cost savings and improve access to training
  • Streamlined paying subcontractors, such as plumbers, electricians, and builders, using Oracle iSupplier and benefited from the security offered by Oracle On Demand to give suppliers’ online access to MHP’s systems without the need for additional firewalls
  • Began to deploy Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and used the many of out-of-the-box financial and human resources (HR) reports, to monitor key performance indicators, including staff turnover, contract leakage, and debtor days
  • Built a management reporting environment using Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and created foundations for delivering daily dashboards and drill-down capabilities to 75 decision-makers
  • Capitalized on outsourcing to Oracle’s hosted cloud platform to enable IT teams and managers to focus on leveraging technology assets for business value instead of day-to-day maintenance and support
  • Migrated a third-party document management system, used to scan and store tenancy agreements, details of rental payments, and maintenance records on each property, to Oracle Technology On Demand and made preparations to migrate property management solution in 2012
  • Used Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite to model, configure, and document business processes and establish governance around change to avoid unauthorized development
  • Benefited from Oracle’s stringent change management procedures for customers’ hosted environments to enforce process governance and approval through MHP’s designated change approvers before configuring, patching, or upgrading both Oracle and nonOracle applications
  • Gained flexibility to scale infrastructure and gain new capabilities at the speed of business demand
  • Estimated that outsourcing to Oracle on Demand and Oracle Technology On Demand to deploy a cloud solution on an integrated platform will save 30%, compared to the cost of operating a similar facility in house