Transforming the management, and performance of repairs, voids and income management processes at CHP

Published by Sarah Hill for Clearview Systems in Housing and also in Bill Payments, Communities

Based in Chelmsford, Essex, CHP is a locally managed and governed charitable housing association which provides high-quality affordable family homes and apartments to rent and buy.

Established in March 2002, CHP has two main aims – to provide excellent services and to increase the supply of affordable homes to those in need. At the end of April 2012, CHP owned 8594 homes, of which 7696 were rented, 206 were shared ownership and 692 were leasehold. CHP became a Clearview customer in 2005.

James Dickman, Service Development Manager within the ICT team at CHP,  explains: “We recognised the importance of providing managers and staff with easy access to management and process information. We wanted a mechanism by which they could be self-sufficient in obtaining some of the key underlying data from our Central Housing Management System. [Clearview’s] Process Management is a user-friendly system with screens that are easy to understand and reports that are easy to run. It is a powerful tool and users do not have to be IT or data experts to see what is going on out in the business.”

Jack Ingham, Logistics Manager at CHP, added: “The Logistics team supports the Repairs, Voids and Decent Homes teams in delivering services to residents and uses the system to monitor and report on jobs at various stages in the workflow. The system has enabled the team to liaise more closely with contractors about completed works and understand the split of work by priority to manage contractors more effectively. The system has enabled us to cleanse the data from the source systems and better understand individual team performance. In the future we are looking at using it to tackle jobs before they go outside of tolerance and aide our drive to reduce average days to complete jobs and thus improve customer service in this area.”

Jane Martin, Housing Options Manager, said: “We use the system to monitor our void processes – checking each void property’s progress through the property event records imported into the system automatically from our housing management system. The system is used by managers and housing options co-ordinators that have responsibility for letting properties on a daily basis. It has allowed for a significant improvement in the processing of void properties and the associated re-let times. In particular, we have been able to track the processing of voids and ensure that events are used correctly. We have been able to manage voids by patch to drive improvements in the process throughout.”

For more information about Clearview’s products and services or to read the full CHP case study visit the Clearview website www.clearviewsystems.org. You can also follow Clearview on Twitter.