Swindon boosts housing services

Councils' commercial operation installs new workforce planning system

Swindon Borough Council's commercial arm is to install a £1.4m IT management package to help deliver services to citizens.

Swindon Commercial Services (SCS) needs the system to help deal more efficiently with functions such as refuse, highway and housing maintenance.

Neil Saunders, head of building at SCS, says the 200-strong company has only recently been placed on a commercial footing, and needs to invest in IT to improve its market position.

'Our existing platforms just didn’t perform as well as they needed to,' he said.

The package consists of six new pieces of software that have been tied together to work as a single system by SCS's development partner, Consilium.

Thanks to the new package, SCS is now on the verge of a leap forward in the way it works, says Saunders.

'I can already see from the first few weeks of the company using this package, our people are starting to see how slick this system is,' he said.

'We are now getting a workforce planning system that can link with mobiles and a customer-facing diagnostics package. Both help better direct our labour.'

Using mobile handheld devices will make SCS's field personnel much more responsive in the way they work, says Saunders.

'The call centre will receive a call from the client - a housing tenant – it is diagnosed by the software, and comes out needing an emergency job,' he said.

'It will go within two minutes from accepting that job to the correct operative who is best skilled and geographically closest to the house to carry it out.'