Case Study: The Hebrew Free Burial Association

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The Challenge

The Hebrew Free Burial Association began in the 1880's as a free burial society serving the residents of Manhattan's Lower East Side and was incorporated as a non-profit organization in 1889. As the need grew in adjacent Jewish communities, HFBA also grew to serve the broader metropolitan area of New York City. HFBA is currently the largest free burial society outside of Israel.

Sidian Consulting was hired to build a browser-based intranet application that provides a full management solution to The Hebrew Free Burial Association’s businesses.

The Solution

The existing management application, which was written in DOS, was decommissioned and a custom, browser-based intranet application was put in its place. We migrated the existing data from two legacy systems that were in use into a SQL Server database. Adobe ColdFusion was the application server chosen to run the application, which allowed us to easily leverage Adobe Acrobat functionality for document conversion and manipulation.

The application provides a full suite of burial and donor tracking, accounting, letter and statement generation, mailing list manager, digital document management, a full cemetery management program, and more.

Remote access is available through a Virtual Private Network to application users outside the office, whether telecommuting or for emergency purposes, as well as to the Association-owned cemeteries for performing decedent lookups and daily reports.

The Results

One central, state-of-the-art system, accessible to the Association users anywhere, day or night.