North East champion, Datatron, helps housing association turn paperwork into low-cost housing

For immediate release - 17 May 2022

North Shields, UK - Today, Datatron can reveal the extraordinary story of how it helped Sunderland housing trust Gentoo scan and digitise historical paperwork, allowing the association to turn unneeded office space into 15 affordable properties.

‘We helped Gentoo turn paperwork into homes,’ says David Popay, founder and managing director of Datatron, a North Shields-based scanning bureau and electronic document management specialist.

Gentoo Group owns and manages more than 29,500 homes across Sunderland. Formed in 2001, it has accumulated a lot of paperwork - records for each house and tenant - totalling more than 600,000 sheets of paper spread across five offices in the city.

To help Gentoo free up space, Datatron carefully boxed, tagged and scanned tens of thousands of documents from one of the offices. But moving the documents was only half the story. Datatron made the documents available online for Gentoo staff. This helps to streamline everyday business processes and allows staff to respond faster to tenants’ requests.

This is just the start. Two more of Gentoo’s offices will soon move to Sunderland City Hall. This is another big change for the housing association but it also means even less storage space. Datatron is stepping in again to move all their legacy files off-site to help make the move possible.

‘Everybody at Datatron is proud to help Gentoo save money, improve efficiency and deliver more affordable housing for the people of Sunderland,’ concludes David Popay.

For more information about Datatron’s work for Gentoo please read our case study: 1996 Datatron has been providing high-quality document management services throughout the UK to the public and private sectors. With the capacity to scan more than one million documents a week, we are the largest bureau in the Northeast with services that cover the whole of the UK, and clients stretching from Southampton to Aberdeen.