Wisdom For The Crown Estate
There is no organisation in the world quite like The Crown Estate. With a property portfolio encompassing many of the UK’s cityscapes, ancient forests, farms, parkland, coastline and communities, The Crown Estate’s role as an employer, influencer, manager, guardian, facilitator and revenue creator is unique.
The agency has two main objectives: to benefit the taxpayer by paying the revenue from its assets directly to the Treasury; and to enhance the value of the estate and the income it generates.
Our Wisdom implementation is straight out of the box with virtually no customisation or integration, yet it continues to deliver an increasing range of solutions across the business. This ranges from health and safety to the management of title deeds for our large and diverse portfolio properties.
Martin Brazier, Knowledge Manager, The Crown Estate
The Requirement
The responsibility of managing, protecting and developing the heritage of urban, rural, marine and energy assets in Her Majesty’s interests demands the best and most advanced business practices. The Crown Estate needed an Electronic Documents and Records Management (eDRM) solution which could face and resolve these challenges by moving from a paper file culture to one of managed electronic files. It was important that the people using the system would find it easy, quick and convenient and that the previously hard to locate information would be at their fingertips.
The Challenge
Changing the ‘you never know when you might need them' culture of storing paper files to one that places ultimate trust on Electronic Document and Records Management (eDRM) was The Crown Estate’s biggest challenge.
The Crown Estate recognised that implementing an eDRM solution doesn't necessarily mean employees will be keen to change the way they work. However, with Wisdom the enterprise benefits of the solution quickly became clear, not only from a process point of view but also from a people perspective.
Savings
The Crown Estate’s property portfolio is valued at more than £8 billion and until 2006 operated using around 85,000 paper files. Implementing Wisdom has meant that those files are now an archive of decreasing value, with Wisdom used as the corporate record. As part of the organisation’s ’20 Year Rule' project, Wisdom is the repository of scanned images of those paper files that the organisation needs to keep. This has opened up new opportunities to deliver improvements to business processes.
Title deeds can now be accessed in seconds, meaning the organisation can react more quickly to market conditions and can deliver direct savings in legal costs for property transactions.
The Crown Estate’s legal partners and managing agents increasingly use Wisdom too, which they access through the organisation’s extranet, allowing the software to streamline the entire process from start to finish.
Additional Benefits
Wisdom laid the basis for creating a more efficient, effective and delivery focused organisation, which is meeting The Crown Estate’s high standards in the quickest and most qualitative way.