Accent Group raises the roof on performance using Talend Integration Suite

UK social housing association selects open source data integration software.

Overview

Nationally based Accent Group has been investing in local communities for more than 40 years. It manages its homes and residents’ services through its three registered providers, Accent Foundation, Accent Nene and Accent Peerless.

In addition to providing homes, Accent also delivers housing, training and regeneration transformational projects in its communities. The Group won a Housing Corporation Gold Award in 2008 for Tackling Worklessness.

Challenge

Housing up to 20,000 families, Accent Group had the challenge of dealing with high volumes of personal data and application forms across disparate systems. In addition, its three registered providers used a range of different platforms including IBM iSeries and Windows, which meant that accessing and moving data was extremely tedious.

Accent Group needed one common tool for managing its variety of disparate systems such as its anti social management system, HR system and financial system.

As a housing association, Accent Group must comply with regulatory requirements outlined by the Tenant Services Authority and the National Register of Social Housing (NROSH), which is a system for collecting social housing data on individual properties. To meet these requirements, the organisation needed a tool that had the capability to provide detailed reports for evidencing its compliance. To achieve this, the association needed a data integration tool that would link all systems and information seamlessly.

Solution

After considering several solutions, Accent Group selected Talend Integration Suite, an enterprise open source data integration tool.

Being open source, Accent Group was able to trial Talend Open Studio prior to committing to Talend Integration Suite.

Andy Gowdy, MBCS CITP, Legacy System Manager at Accent Group commented: “Trialing Talend Open Studio prior to taking on Talend Integration Suite was incredibly valuable. It reassured us that Talend’s software had the capacity to cope with huge influxes of data across a number of systems and this was a key selling point for us.”

Andy Gowdy elaborated: “We also needed a cost effective tool that would act as one central hub for accessing and sharing data in order to integrate information for both practice and reporting purposes. Talend Integration Suite met these requirements perfectly.”

“It only took two days to install so we were extremely pleased with the overall delivery time-scale as well as the smooth running of the implementation,” Andy Gowdy added.

Talend Integration Suite provides advanced capabilities that dramatically improve the productivity of data integration job design and proven scalability to ensure optimal execution.

Benefits

Using Talend Integration Suite, Accent Group has been able to seamlessly integrate its financial, HR and anti-social behaviour systems through one main hub.

Andy Gowdy commented: “Through having one central system for integrating and migrating data, we can now pull information instantly. We also have the ability to present it in an XML or CSV format for reporting to external governing bodies such as the National Register of Social Housing (NROSH) and meeting key performance criteria. It is very easy to use and having the capability to simply drag information for reporting is an extremely efficient way for us to work.”

“With Talend Integration Suite, instead of taking up to a month to create complex reports in order to meet these regulatory requirements, Accent Group can collate relevant data from all sources accurately in just one day. This has had a significant effect on productivity and customer service, by providing staff with an easy-to-use open source data integration tool that can radically reducing the time usually taken to process applications,” said Andy Gowdy.

Andy Gowdy continued: “In particular, a major benefit for our legal department is greater visibility of real-time information, which is crucial for strategic decision making.”

Andy Gowdy said: “Talend Integration Suite has the ability to exact data from our SQL Server database, enabling us to create business intelligence for performance analysis. Furthermore, we can now map activity to a standard set measure, which is absolutely crucial for developing strategies and measuring performance.”

“We needed a cost effective solution for integrating all of our information and having found such a highly scalable and interoperable open source tool such as Talend Integration Suite has highlighted how valuable open source offerings are. Not only is it dramatically lower in cost than proprietary software, we have also benefited from having the freedom to tailor the software internally - we are currently using it to carry out a pilot scheme for anti social behaviour,” concluded Andy Gowdy.