Festival Housing Group has completed the implementation of a comprehensive upgrade to its Clearview performance management system. The new system gives the housing provider a ‘single version of the truth’ for over 70 KPIs, based on 21 million rows of data.
Having been a Clearview customer since 2005, the upgrade to Clearview’s web-based Performance Scorecard v2 has enabled Festival Housing to automatically feed data into the system without manual intervention, and to categorise KPIs in multiple ways to enable low-level analysis of data and spot ‘root cause’ problems quickly.
Lee Parkes, head of performance improvement, Festival Housing Group, said, “Back in 2009, we lacked confidence in the accuracy of the reported data. There were issues concerning a common understanding of the business rules being used when sourcing information and there was a ‘cottage industry’ servicing the information needs of the business because too much knowledge was in the heads of just a few members of staff.
“Performance Scorecard v2 gave us the opportunity to build a ‘single version of the truth’; a definitive information resource that everyone in the organisation could use. We could cut the risks associated with sourcing accurate information and reduce our dependence on key resources.”
Based on the functionality of the new Clearview software, Festival began a project to build a library of KPIs with clearly-defined and documented business rules regarding how they should be calculated, categorised and the data required sourced, alongside automating most of the data-capture processes, and then provide tailored, role-specific scorecards for people throughout the organisation.
Robert Blatchford, a business intelligence consultant hired by Festival Housing, said, “We identified over 70 KPIs of specific interest and for each we delivered a documented definition and the business rules for how to calculate it, details of where the data was held and how we would extract it, and a Microsoft SQL Integration Services package to get the data out.”
Festival can now populate all of its reporting scorecards within an hour. It processes 21 million rows of data to automatically feed 10,000 records into Clearview to populate the 71 KPIs and their categories, saving the housing provider over 10 man-days each month.
Parkes said, “We now have a clearly-defined and documented set of KPIs that are used throughout Festival Housing, and the ability to analyse by category gives us a rounded perspective and analysis on each KPI. People no longer ask to have data amended in the reports because the source system is right, and as it’s so easy to populate Clearview, we can run the capture routines again if necessary to pick up any late data.”
