Aspire Housing, Coast and Country Housing and South Liverpool Homes are all set to go live over the next few months with Orchard Information Systems’ resident involvement (RI) module which was jointly developed by the housing providers working collaboratively with Orchard’s staff. The RI module is an extension of Orchard’s main housing management system.
SLH expects to use the RI module to centralise all RI information, target customer profile groups better, and deliver RI projects from strategy planning through to impact assessment while monitoring budgets, resources and risks. The module is also expected to reduce administrative time and improve reporting. The module is scheduled to be operational this month.
When its RI module goes live in October 2012, Coast and Country wants to use it to increase the integration and visibility of its RI information and activities within its core tenant and property management systems and to improve the capture of evidential data for TPAS accreditation automatically through day-to-day processing.
Aspire has more than 800 involved customers on its database, 80 of whom are actively involved in a customer group or training activity, with more than 150 meetings or activities taking place each year. Aspire’s previous RI tool was based on an Access database with limited functionality, poor security and involved duplicating records with its main Orchard Housing system.
As part of its involvement in the development of the RI module, Aspire wanted a better way to record the contributions being made by involved customers and to target its engagement activities better. Aspire also wanted an easier way to measure the impact that RI is having on its communities and to quantify the resulting social value.
Scheduled for live operation in November 2012, Aspire is expecting the RI module to deliver considerable process efficiencies, especially as its actively involved customers become more IT literate and can receive information and documents via emails automatically generated by the module. For its involved customers, Aspire will have much better information on their contribution and about their skills, allowing Aspire to personalise its approaches to their involvement.
