London & Quadrant Housing Trust went live in January 2009 with CorVu’s performance management system for its key performance indicators (KPIs).
L&Q, which manages 60,000 homes in London and South East England, had previously been using Excel spreadsheets for its various reporting requirements using data from its self-built Arena housing management system.
Grant Killick, assistant director of IS development, London & Quadrant, said, “Originally we were using a housing application which didn’t really do what we wanted, so five years ago we hired a developer to build a system that would meet our needs. It had to do everything from estate management to revenue tracking to arrears. We got it to a point where we were using reporting tools, which were created by two of our staff taking all the data from Arena and putting it into Excel spreadsheets. Our executive finance director, who is now our CEO, wanted to streamline the process and create one easy interface that everyone could use.”
L&Q staff need to produce KPIs for a range of activities, including reporting to the executive board and the Government. The CorVu system streamlines the production of these reports by integrating with L&Q’s Arena system. Killick said, “CorVu lets our staff access the information they want in a format which suits their needs, such as a table or a graph.”
For example, the executive board of L&Q now receives a weekly alert which is created in CorVu at the touch of a button, and L&Q’s neighbourhood directors receive an alert if an annual gas inspection needs to be conducted within the next two weeks.
The CorVu system has allowed L&Q staff to automate some of their work. This includes automatic emails to flag potential problems – a traffic light approach which shows the proximity to targets or thresholds with red, yellow and green indicators, such as high-level summaries sent to senior executives each month or ‘good indicators’ sent to let managers know if an account’s arrears are low.
Killick said, “The real benefit for us is that we can reduce administrative time, enabling staff to focus on helping L&Q provide better service.”
