Aareon has completed one of the first implementations of the latest version of its Aareon QL housing management software at One Manchester.
One Manchester was formed in 2015 from the merger of Eastland Homes and City South Manchester Housing Trust. A key part of the merger was to consolidate the core systems, with a single housing management system enabling a single view of properties and tenants for staff, the opportunity to deploy new processes and a single customer and property data set.
With the help of Charles Brooks, consulting director at 3C Consulting, One Manchester issued a Further Competition tender, resulting in the selection of the latest version (v4) of Aareon’s QL housing management system. The implementation itself began in December 2015.
The implementation was based on Aareon’s Best Practice Implementation Methodology, with a dedicated Aareon project manager responsible for managing resources, planning and delivering the project on time, within budget and to quality standards. Aareon also assigned a high-level project sponsor who communicated with their One Manchester counterpart; although they were both removed from the project’s day-to-day issues, they received reports and regular updates from their project managers to show progress against key milestones and to oversee the smooth running of the project.
A dedicated website was accessible by both the One Manchester and Aareon project teams as the central facility for the project, where meeting dates, key milestones were added to the project diary, to-do lists were created and allocated to members of the project teams, and workshop notes and actions were stored.
John McGrail, group director of finance, One Manchester, said, “One Manchester and Aareon have worked closely in the successful implementation of QL4, made the more challenging as it brought two different organisations and ways of working together on a common platform.”
Charles Brooks, consulting director, 3C Consultants, said, “The implementation of Aareon QL as One Manchester’s new housing management system alongside a triad of systems for electronic document management, 1st Touch repairs and invoice payments cannot be underestimated. The actual go-live was one of the calmest I have seen, with all post go-live issues managed successfully.”
