Wales & West Housing has moved to Microsoft Dynamics 365, completely replacing its Capita housing management system.
Gareth Davies, director of technology and data, Wales & West Housing, said, “A big part of our reason for moving to Microsoft Dynamics 365 was that the technology landscape in the housing sector was quite stale. There were a lot of technology products that had been around for a long time and there was little innovation taking place.
“People were waiting for a long time to see updates and improvements come through the HMS providers’ pipelines, so something had to change.”
Gavin Jones, technology portfolio manager, Wales & West Housing, said, “We did contemplate doing the Dynamics implementation ourselves but we realised that we would have to crack the whole rent engine thing, and that’s a tall order for any housing provider.
“At first, we had the naïve belief that if we all sat down with a blank sheet of paper, we could design it ourselves. However, it soon became too overwhelming and that’s when we realised we needed a Microsoft partner to help with the transition.”
Wales & West asked RedkiteCRM (now part of Infinity Group) to help it move from its existing Capita HMS to Dynamics.
Sarah McRow, head of housing sales, Infinity Group, said, “When we started RedkiteCRM, we were determined to focus on housing because we absolutely believed Dynamics had so much to offer to housing providers.
“We also wanted to develop modules that could be quickly installed and could change a vanilla CRM system into a fully-functional HMS. When Wales & West asked us to help develop a rent management product, we were really excited about the challenge and opportunity.”
Wales & West and RedkiteCRM embarked on a joint project to develop a rent engine so that the housing provider could switch off its Capita HMS.
After its rent engine went live, Wales & West then added more Dynamics functionality and as more modules have been rolled out, the housing provider’s approach to development has changed to a more hybrid model.
Gavin Jones said, “We didn’t want to be dependent on our partner so we wanted to do some of the work ourselves and thus far it has worked very well.
“Infinity Group understands our system intimately and offers us help when we need it. Working with a partner gives us true flexibility because we can decide whether to outsource to Infinity or contemplate doing the changes ourselves.”
Wales & West now plans to adopt AI and Microsoft Copilot and enhance Dynamics with compliance and asset management modules built by Infinity Group, as part of its BrikHousing HMS.
Gareth Davies said, “We have a future project to integrate telemetry devices and sensors to Microsoft Dynamics. After all, the data is there so why not use it to deliver a better service to our residents?”
