Affinity Sutton is one of the largest housing providers in England with over 57,000 properties in over 120 local authorities from Newcastle Upon Tyne in the North East to Plymouth in the South West. They provide a range of housing and community focused services to over 1.6 million residents living in their homes.
The legacy system
Affinity Sutton realised that their existing system could no longer perform all the functions they required.
Some of the key issues were:
- Inability to add metadata, resulting in poor search results
- Limited user numbers
- Poor interoperability with other systems
- Inability to set time periods for image life
Moving to Asset Bank’s Digital Asset Management Software
After completing a tender process, Asset Bank’s Digital Asset Management system was chosen as the system fulfilled almost all the criteria.
Their new solution provides the following functionality:
- Branded login screen for asset users
- Affinity Sutton can now share all their digital files among staff, including images, documents, logos and video content.
- Asset Bank’s advanced search functionality allows Affinity Sutton to assign as much metadata to a file as needed (title, description, keywords, estate, etc.) so all assets can be easily found.
- Auto-complete functionality - so when a user starts typing into the search area it suggests possible matching search terms based on existing metadata. It also offers advanced search to allow the user to search across specific attributes or search within date ranges.
- Multiple browsing methods ranging from site wide filtering (to focus the browse category structure to a particular region of the country), browse by keywords, browse by estate, browse promoted items or browse recently added.
Integration with third party systems
Perhaps one of the most important functionalities Affinity Sutton required of their new asset management system was to integrate it with a templating system that sits on a third party server. We used Asset Bank publishing functionality to achieve this. Now all of the template images are managed and updated in Asset Bank and any changes are synced across overnight to their other application.
"Since implementing the Asset Bank Digital Asset Management system, Affinity Sutton hasn't looked back. The transition to the new system went extremely smoothly and Bright Interactive could not have been more friendly or accommodating. We have received really positive feedback from our users who say the system is professional and very easy to use."
Sue Wafer, Resident Marketing Executive at Affinity Sutton
