By Haris Khan, Director, Group Strategy and UK Commercial at Plentific
The delivery and maintenance of quality homes to keep residents safe and satisfied is the top priority for all housing providers. The ambition of the Housing to 2040 strategy is simple and clear: “ for everyone to have a safe, good quality and affordable home that meets their needs”. However, we know from our work with the sector that the journey to get to this point has its challenges. One of the most common we find is outdated processes and a lack of accessible, actionable insights for repairs, maintenance and compliance.
Whilst there’s a consensus that a safe, good quality and affordable home should be the standard for residents everywhere, the reality is that there are many factors which can negatively impact this ambition. Pressures to build new homes and keep up with the housing demand. Net zero targets and sustainability goals. Retrofits and works required to keep up the quality standards of existing properties. Now imagine you have these challenges and many more, for one thousand, ten thousand, maybe a hundred thousand properties. It can feel impossible to keep the quality of service high and be cost-effective without access to good quality data and insights to help manage the process.
The use of technology and data to improve services such as repairs, maintenance and compliance is not new to housing providers, but the sector is still going through a transition to become more data-driven and understand how to best utilise the information available to benefit residents and communities.
Which type of information can you collect? How simple is it to implement? And importantly - how will it benefit your residents and communities? Here are some examples of how data can be used to enhance repairs, maintenance and compliance processes.
Benchmarking
Data captured on-site from works can be used to benchmark and analyse performance. A good example of this is being able to identify the current number of homes which are energy inefficient, and where certain types of appliances are breaking down more often than others. Collecting data such as age, condition, and work history can enable you to make informed decisions for planned maintenance programmes. In turn, this can help reduce the fuel poverty across your portfolio and improve the quality of housing.
Safety
There has certainly been a shift in focus across the sector, moving away from check-box compliance to safety and truly understanding the details behind the work completed. The golden-thread of information is in focus, and is very much applicable across all areas of compliance. Providers are favouring a proactive approach, keeping a cloud based, real-time audit trail of compliance and moving away from reactive spreadsheets and paper-based processes.
Technology is also being used to ensure competency and quality, verifying details of visiting operatives to ensure that qualified professionals are completing the works required. Moreover, technology is being used to reduce the chance of human error by prompting a standardised way of working using mobile devices.
Economic benefit
Live and historical data captured on spend, cash flow, team performance as well as contractor performance can be used to optimise costs for upcoming repairs and compliance activities. Simply being able to break work order data down into its individual components - user, trade, service type and resident feedback, can help improve the rate of ‘first time fixes’ whilst offering residents a more reliable service - one that improves continually based on feedback.
Similarly, being able to intelligently collate overall spend on maintenance activities, average invoice costs and payment times for invoices can help better understand works-in-progress and reduce costs associated with aged WIP.
On October 13, Plentific will be joining the SFHA for a webinar to discuss how resident service and satisfaction can be enhanced through the use of repairs, maintenance and compliance technology. You can register for this session free of charge here: https://www.sfha.co.uk/whats-on/event-details/harnessing-repairs-maintenance--compliance-data
