Stockport Homes is a housing provider based in Greater Manchester, established in 2005 as an Arm’s Length Management Organisation (ALMO) to manage Stockport Council’s housing stock. Now part of the Stockport Homes Group, it also owns and develops new homes, making it the area’s largest landlord.
The group includes Viaduct Housing, Three Sixty, and SKylight, working together to meet housing and social needs across the region. With a mission of "One Team – Transforming Lives," Stockport Homes delivers a range of services from tenancy support to employment and wellbeing initiatives, and has earned national recognition for excellence and employee engagement.
SHG recognised the need for a digital document management system to support operational growth, improve document security, and increase efficiency.
With hundreds of staff accessing and handling documents daily across housing services, maintenance, and customer support, SHG’s reliance on manual document handling and email workflows created bottlenecks.
In 2024, their goals became clearer than ever: reduce inefficiencies, strengthen compliance, and support hybrid working.
However, like many social housing providers, SHG faced significant barriers to digital transformation.
"We knew we needed a document management system that could integrate with our existing platforms and be scaled out across the organisation. But the initial implementation had to be low-disruption and scalable. We heard other Housing Associations recommend DocTech at Housing Peer Group Meetings. This gave us a lot of confidence. ”
IT Manager at Stockport Homes Group.
To overcome these challenges and implement a secure, cloud-based DMS, SHG partnered with DocTech, who brought decades of experience in social housing digitalisation and a deep understanding of sector-specific workflows.
The chosen solution was DocuWare, a leading cloud-based document management platform offering secure storage, intelligent indexing, automated workflows, and compliance-ready features.
DocTech and SHG followed a clear, collaborative roadmap to ensure a smooth deployment with minimal disruption. The process began with thorough process mapping and needs analysis, where DocTech worked closely with SHG to assess current workflows, pinpoint pain points, and define retention and compliance requirements.
SHG IT Manager explains:
“We used process mapping to get a clear picture of where time was being lost and what we needed from a DMS,”
Once the statement of works was signed off, DocTech custom-configured DocuWare to integrate with SHG’s housing management system, with bespoke workflows and compliance settings. Training sessions were recorded ahead of the Go Live.
SHG's partnership with DocTech highlights how a structured, collaborative approach can remove the roadblocks to digital transformation — even in complex, resource-conscious environments like social housing.
DocTech have implemented a future-ready document management framework for SHG. They have alleviated their initial need to stop over using SharePoint and the solution will scale with them for years to come.
Since adopting DocuWare, Stockport Homes Group has achieved:
DocTech continues to support SHG beyond deployment, refining workflows and ensuring user adoption as well as further integration capabilities with their Housing management system – Civica CX. The relationship didn’t stop once the system went live. That post-implementation support really helped us optimise our setup.
