North Lanarkshire Council has chosen Kirona’s mobile working and dynamic job scheduling software to support staff in its housing and home care departments. Since implementing the Job Manager and Xmbrace DRS software, the council has reduced its administrative costs by almost £300,000 per year. It has also boosted the productivity of its local homes teams by 20 per cent and reduced the ‘no access’ rate of its housing repairs team from 40 per cent to just three per cent.
The main challenge within the housing department centred on the availability of its repairs staff to carry out vital repair work. In some cases, tenants had to wait for up to three days for an appointment to be met and the work completed.
Robert Forman, service manager for business process change and improvement, North Lanarkshire Council, said, “Typically, housing repair representatives would come into a central hub in the morning, pick up their job list and then go out to work. After they’d completed their jobs for that day, they would then travel back to the central hub to log their activity.
“By using Kirona’s Job Manager, they can get up in the morning and are allocated a job that is never more than 15 minutes away. Also, now that their work is logged electronically, there’s no need to keep travelling back and forth. They are now also geographically profiled, so we are better able to manage their time effectively and provide a more efficient service for our residents.”
In the home care department, the council carries out 2.5 million home visits a year, meaning around 7,500 home visits every day. The council’s main challenge was front-line care, with its home support workers having a limited amount of time to spend with service-users due to increased administrative duties between home visits. Home support workers are now provided with mobile devices to receive and organise home visit information, allocated and managed centrally via Kirona DRS software at a local authority building.
Des Murray, head of housing property, North Lanarkshire Council, said, “Kirona’s workforce management software was chosen as it demonstrated a wide range of capabilities, supported by a proven track record with its customers. It manages everything from the scheduling of jobs in the office with the Xmbrace DRS software, through to the fulfilment of the work by housing repair representatives using the Job Manager mobile application.”
Forman said, “Kirona Job Manager is now being used by over 1,200 home support workers carrying out 2,500,000 essential visits each year. The benefits of doing this electronically mean we are no longer posting out at least 3,000 schedules a week (150,000 a year) and no longer making at least 4,000 outgoing calls a week advising of changes (200,000 a year), leading to savings of around £280,000 per year in reduced administrative costs.”
