Social housing company to save £1.1m a year with concierge IT overhaul

Your Homes Newcastle is implementing Awi MX from NDL to improve its concierge services

Newcastle City Council's social housing company, Your Homes Newcastle (YHN), is to save millions of pounds in the next three years by overhauling its concierge IT systems, according to head of IT Geoff Ellingham.

As part of the project, YHN will implement public sector solutions provider NDL's Awi MX platform, which uses data from multiple back-office systems and allows end users to access the data via a mobile application on their smartphone or tablet.

Ellingham said YHN was already working with NDL on a project to overhaul its back-office systems.

"We wanted to effectively change our concierge services. We wanted to create a centralised service, networking all of our blocks and creating a control room with images and call centre staff. We then wanted mobile concierge teams who would go out and do responsive work.

"In order to provide a good responsive service we needed good mobile technology so we took the opportunity while we were doing the procurement with NDL for our back-office systems to buy the MX toolkit as well," he said.

Ellingham said that YHN wanted to save costs and become more efficient.

He said that currently, YHN staff who work on the concierge service carry out block inspections and deal with issues such as trespassing, meaning that they are always on the move.

YHN concierges are based in an office within a block of flats, with residents reporting problems directly to them. Ellingham said that this means that when a concierge is dealing with one problem it is difficult for residents to contact them.

"It is very wasteful having a member of staff waiting in one of our blocks for somebody to approach them with a question. It is a difficult job as it is sometimes done alone or at night. We wanted them to only go out when they are needed," he said.

The head of IT at YHN said that another key benefit would be to make staff more efficient.

"A lot of time is spent going to people's homes, recording the conversation and going back to the office to transcribe it. We can make staff more efficient if we give them tools to go to customers' homes and enter everything that needs to be entered there on a device," he said.

Ellingham said that the NDL solution will present workflow information for YHN staff clearly and concisely on their smartphone or tablet.

"For example, many back-office systems require clicking through pages and screens, which is fine if you are in the office. Some mobile solutions replicate that back-office system on a mobile but it is hard to go through all of the screens [on a mobile device] as they display too much information.

"NDL allows us to build screens to take the work through a flow, so you'll just be presented with the required information on a screen, and the staff can look at everything using dropdown boxes," he said.

He said that the solution allows YHN staff to build their own screens.

"The NDL solution has the ability to build these screens in a quick and easy way, and it is connected to the back-office system so what the user sees [on their mobile device] is a simple set of three or four screens.

"The NDL integration tool opens up the back-office system and goes through all of those clicks and screens and pages that are seen at back office. The great thing is the integration – building screens and interfaces can all be done by our own staff," he said.

Ellingham said that the changes to its concierge services, including the NDL deployment, will help YHN to save "millions of pounds".

"There will be significant cost savings, certainly in the millions over the course of the next three years. Most of which comes from the total number of staff who are employed.

"There will be 25 per cent less staff. When all the costs associated with the project are taken into account, including the technology, YHN expects to save £1.1m per year," he said.

Ellingham said NDL's Awi MX solution was chosen because it isn't tied to a single operating system or device and because YHN can also benefit from NDL's user group, which allows public sector organisations who use NDL to share ideas and applications with each other.

He said that YHN looked at alternative solutions but that other providers wanted to provide a way of managing YHN's service with very little flexibility.

YHN is looking to start implementation of Awi MX in 12 months, after it moves its concierge services to a centralised system. It will look to complete the concierge overhaul in six to 12 months.