CP12 Landlord Gas Certificates – daily, automated, secure, auditable and highly cost effective production and mailing of Landlord Gas Safety Certificates

The Client

Our client is one of the south and south west’s leading social housing providers with more than 55,000 homes and 130,000 people under its care. Their aim is to achieve its social purpose, while growing sustainably.

Business Requirements

Effective, low cost communication to residents for critical documents is a key business requirement and the client had identified that the daily production of their CP12 Gas Safety Certificates was costly, time consuming and due to the manual processes involved highly unproductive. Nevertheless it is a business critical requirement to ensure Gas Safety certificates are printed and mailed in a timely manner. Previously it was reliant on frontline staff being taken out of action to manually process the certificates each day.

The current practice was extremely time consuming and very labour intensive and involved manually printing and folding the certificate, enclosing into envelopes, franking and posting. Worse still, the current document output was such that the address was printed in the middle of a landscape orientated sheet of A4 which meant the client had to procure specially made envelopes with a unique window position to enable the address to be visible for mailing purposes – at great cost.

The daily document printing and mailing was identified as being hugely costly both in terms of lost productivity and the cost to the organisation in manual fulfilment and envelope cost. 

The GPS Solution

Following careful discussions our client selected GPS to provide an automated solution. The initial requirement was to create bespoke programming to enable automated document production in a more practical, customer friendly and much less costly format. GPS set about creating a program to extract the name and address details from the supplied pdf data and reformatting it to fit a standard C5 envelope window. Furthermore the program also added the clients branding details and a personalised letter to the recipient on the reverse of the Gas Safety Certificate so two previously separate documents were combined into one.

Client data is now auto submitted via a secure ftp connection into our ISO27001 international data security accredited facility where it is processed every week day at 7:30 am. The data is processed and output to pdf format from where it is automatically uploaded to our Clarity Mail (hybrid mail) service. At 3:00pm every day the gas safety certificates are printed, securely collated and mailed in a pre-determined 2^nd class, mono format.

Receipt of overnight data triggers an auto email confirming receipt and confirmation of the number of certificates to be produced to all relevant stakeholders providing a fully auditable data receipt and document output trail.

This is all completed in a secure, auditable production facility meeting the clients data protection requirements whilst also delivering significant print, fulfilment and postage savings as well as significant productivity gains.

Client Benefits

The client now has an automated process in place to process daily files, output Gas Safety Certificates and mail them. The client has identified the following key benefits following migration to an out-sourced print and mail service.

Brand consistencies – all documents submitted have total consistency of material and print quality

Staff time – the current process saves an estimated 10 hours every week. This equates to a total of 520 colleague hours that can now be devoted to providing greater customer service.

Cost benefits – the GPS solution provides a faster, much more economical automated solution that requires no human input. Letters are submitted at a fraction of the cost of internal letter production and much more quickly too whilst providing the client with fully updated records of all letters mailed.

What was previously a tedious, time consuming process is now fully automated and vastly improved with an estimated internal staff cost saving of £2,730 per annum (not including previous internal production and consumable costs).