Cambridge City Council is on target to achieve the Decent Homes standard following its implementation of Anite’s Codeman asset management software, with all of the council’s 7600 social housing properties expected to meet the Government’s minimum requirements by 2010.
Cambridge City Council is upgrading to the latest version of Codeman which offers a improved mobile working technology, allowing surveyors to complete both stock condition checks and HHSRS (Housing Health and Safety Rating System) surveys in the field. Surveyors accessing Codeman via PDAs save time on administrative and back-office tasks and can upload information to the central database back at the council. The council aims to have a 100 per cent stock condition database available by 2009.
Codeman captures information about housing projects, such as stock quality and health and safety standards, and stores it in a central database that can be accessed by the relevant council departments to give greater visibility over housing projects.
Cambridge is also creating business plans using Codeman’s planned maintenance tools, allowing the council to build investment models and track work in progress, making informed decisions about what needs to be done to stay on target and meet the 2010 deadline.
Rania Marjeh, asset management system coordinator, Cambridge City Council, said, “The challenge for us was managing lots of different bits of information relating to social housing projects on disparate systems. This made it difficult to gain a full understanding of housing projects. By using Anite we can now store and access all information about our stock easily and be sure that we are in line to meet the 2010 Decent Homes Standard and it allows our surveyors to complete their work more efficiently onsite with less emphasis on administrative tasks.”
