iSOFT Business Solutions, part of the iSOFT Group and a market leader in providing world-class financial accounting software, procurement and bespoke solutions to service-centric organisations, today announced it has won two landmark contracts for its Integra suite of web-enabled financial and purchasing applications as it looks to expand in new markets.

The deals totaling £477,000 are with Scope, the London-based

charity for people with cerebral palsy and disabled people, and housing association Spectrum Housing Group, based at Christchurch in Dorset.

Scope is buying an Integra e-procurement solution for head office staff and those at its 370 shops across England and Wales to raise orders online. It will also use the OCR (optical character recognition) module to scan invoices to save entering data manually, eliminate errors and speed the approval process, which will again save time and money. With greater control of purchasing and costs the charity expects savings of £500,000 over five years.

Scope also expects Integra to help it improve relations with suppliers. Cutting the time to approve invoices will mean suppliers are paid quicker, which will enable Scope to negotiate better terms and bulk purchases.

The contract with Spectrum includes the full Integra financial suite plus the business intelligence and OCR modules. Integra is replacing three disparate finance systems, acquired through acquisition, and gives users across its seven offices web-based access to raise purchase orders for online authorization plus ready access to a host of financial data to control invoices, payments and costs. Integra will also interface to an existing housing management system for better control of maintenance costs.

Spectrum is one the UK's largest housing associations with 16,000 properties in the south of England. It also maintains a further 30,000 properties for other housing associations. The sector has grown substantially over the past ten years under a government policy encouraging local authorities to shed housing stocks to private operators in a bid to cut costs. There are now 1,800 housing associations in the UK.

"These deals demonstrate that our business is gaining traction with a wider customer base," said Eamonn Morris, Managing Director of iSOFT Business Solutions. "We identified certain markets as being particularly suitable for our Integra suite of solutions, and it's pleasing to see those efforts are already paying off as we continue to build on those partnerships."

iSOFT Business Solutions is unique among iSOFT companies in being the only one selling outside healthcare markets.

Under its strategy to move into new sectors, the company identified the charity and housing association markets as prime targets offering substantial opportunities for its web-based solutions.

iSOFT has partnership agreements with both Scope and Spectrum in which they will act as reference sites to help drive further sales in these sectors.

Further information (external website)