A Carval Success Story

Cardiff Community Housing Association

Cardiff Community Housing Association (CCHA) is an Industrial and Provident Society with charitable status. The Association is registered with and supervised by the Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) and manages a housing stock of approximately 2,500 homes.  In all there are just over 100 staff across three sites.

CCHA has won awards for its approach across many categories including regeneration and diversity. They have also been recognised for striving to achieve customer excellence in all areas of business, both internally and externally. CCHA aims to be an excellent employer and it was this drive to meet the highest standards that led them to review their HR management systems.

One of the core elements of how CCHA meets its objectives and targets is in its exemplary interface with its employees. This has included the introduction of a new and innovative “Better Balance” policy which allows home working, compressed working, start and finish time variants, and team based solutions. The scheme reflects CCHA’s core workplace value that allows an individual’s right to a fulfilled life inside and outside work.

At that stage, the HR team were working mainly with Access Databases, which proved slow, unreliable and caused considerable duplication of work. Paper was the main source of processing policy and procedure and this all too often resulted in requests and amendments being held up. Loss of paper based documents also resulted in wasted time and effort particularly where signatures were required.

 As a result, a project group consisting of the HR and IT teams was set up to assess the business needs both for the HR team itself and for the end users; the staff. The CCHA project group carried out an exhaustive review of the HR systems marketplace. They measured each product against current business requirements and future proofing. A tender process resulted in CCHA choosing the HR Unity range of integrated, flexible and easy-to-use HR solutions from Carval.  

Carval was chosen as the software provided the closest match to CCHA’s business requirements including self-service HR and Time & Attendance systems to manage CCHA’s “Better Balance” policy, record the appraisal process and generate risk assessments. Jim Sweeney, ICT Manager of CCHA says, “we needed to build in specific functionality that met our specific needs. To do this effectively, the chosen supplier had to understand the needs of the HR team in supporting our core values. Carval has demonstrated a very clear understanding of CCHA needs and we have worked well together putting bespoke solutions in place.” 

With the new system in place, CCHA has gained more effective and leaner management of HR in terms of external factors such as legislation, training, and recruitment. HR reporting also became a far more rapid, comprehensive and flexible process allowing management and staff to make faster, more informed decisions. In addition, the Time and Attendance module supported CCHA’s Better Balance initiative; enabling the HR team to manage home working, compressed working and start and finish time variants more effectively.

Louise Sulley, HR Manager added, “There were a great number of tangible benefits with the new HR system. Overall, it was a huge step forward to be able to base decisions upon reports that previously we were unable to create. In addition, the ability of our staff to utilise the self-service functionality has saved a great deal of administration time internally and has been well received by the staff themselves. Most importantly though, we did not need to compromise in any way on our core values; in fact the self service side of the system helped to reinforce them.”

“In practice, we are also now able to input and amend details quickly and accurately and customise screens to cater for new procedures and processes as they arise. The new system has also allowed the devolvement of HR processes to Team Managers.”

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