Sanctuary Housing Association is the largest UK housing association, providing housing and care services, and managing more than 100,000 accommodation units across the UK.

Sanctuary has been running a significant business transformation programme involving the consolidation of its systems onto one SAP platform, using SAP’s Real Estate solution as its core. More than 3,000 users now have access to SAP across a range of modules including CiC, REfx, ALM, Finance, Procurement, HR and Payroll.

This is the first implementation of SAP in the UK Housing sector. The solution enables Sanctuary to have one integrated platform, driving efficiencies and cost reduction in its existing business.

Sanctuary has a stated and continuing strategy of acquisition and growth. The SAP platform will enable an effective integration of systems with acquired organisations, providing efficiencies through the ability to manage all its property businesses on one system platform.

The solution has been delivered through a collaboration of Sanctuary and several delivery partners.

To support the transformation programme in achieving its objectives, a high volume and complex data migration was required from Sanctuary’s numerous and varied legacy systems into SAP. Following a short assessment, Harlex Consulting was engaged by Sanctuary in 2014 to de-risk, plan, lead and deliver a complex and high volume data migration from these different legacy platforms.