Broadacres Housing Association’s paper-based stock condition surveys and customer profiling will be consigned to the past as it adopts a mobile system from 1st Touch.
Survey staff will use the 1st Touch system to record data on all of its properties and tenants and will ultimately build into a planned and costed maintenance review. The mobile system will link directly to Broadacre’s Aareon housing management system to remove the need for manual data transfer, resulting in dynamic updates, greater accuracy and fewer errors due to manual data entry.
With its housing stock spread across a wide rural area with intermittent mobile signal coverage, 1st Touch overcame concerns about geographical coverage through its use of Smart Airtime which sends data in short encrypted bursts only when a signal is available.
Steve Towers, managing director, Broadacres Housing Association, said, “Any maintenance operation is only as good as its underlying system and data. Without a technical solution, we would need to rely on paper and then manually transfer that information to our back-office system.
“With 1st Touch, our savings should be significant, the data collected will be more complete, plus there are additional benefits in terms of customer profiling.”
