Partick Housing Association has successfully automated many of its processes using Aareon’s TaskCentre software, alongside its Aareon QL housing management system that it has been using since 2007.
Elaine Lewty, ICT manager, Partick Housing Association, said, “We knew we wanted to introduce some form of automation in order to replace time-consuming data checking and generally work more efficiently. Instead of performing tasks manually, we now use TaskCentre to see if we can make our processes smarter.
“TaskCentre is always in the background, monitoring what is going on. With TaskCentre installed, we’re not relying on someone to manually check the system. It has saved a massive amount of time and means we can be proactive, instead of reacting to things after the event.”
In the two years that Partick Housing has been using TaskCentre, it has automated a wide range of business processes and extended the capabilities of Aareon QL.
Lewty said, “We perform a routine Direct Debit review and use TaskCentre to query the database and notify us if a tenant needs to adjust their payment. Likewise with arrears – TaskCentre is set up to automatically send a letter or SMS to a tenant if they are more than £250 or £500 in arrears, and if the amount is more than this, it will notify us to take appropriate action.
“Probably the biggest task we addressed was managing and reviewing our housing waiting list. Initially, we had around 4,500 people on our waiting list and it used to take two of our staff two days per month to go through the list, cross-reference applications and issue letters. That is now handled by TaskCentre via SSRS Reporting. Since we’ve been doing this, our waiting list has fallen from 4,500 people to just 393 active applications.”
TaskCentre has also been set up to generate a letter or SMS for when a gas check is due, along with a date and time that an engineer will visit. To date, this has completely removed the need for Partick Housing to carry out any forced entries.
Lewty said, “TaskCentre is all about making sure any given process is running as it should. It changes the way that we work across the entire business. It takes pressure off the IT team, puts more information into the business and improves staff processes. I’m surprised that we managed without it for so long.”
