Following a one-year tendering and selection process, CityWest Homes has signed a £1.5 million contract with Orchard Information Systems for the development and implementation of a new fully-managed and hosted housing management system. The new system is scheduled to be fully operational in 2012 and will be hosted by Orchard’s partner ITPS.
The new housing management system will be based on Orchard Housing and then tailored to the specific needs of the ALMO which manages over 22,000 homes on behalf of Westminster City Council. The solution’s design makes it both a platform and a toolkit, putting the future development of new functionality directly in the hands of the ALMO’s IT team. They will be able to develop their own screens, processes and applications to suit the business without needing to go back to Orchard for further development work, allowing the ALMO to diversify its services without incurring extra costs.
Orchard reported that it has spent additional £3 million on research and development over the past five years, using feedback from user groups, workshops and conferences to drive system enhancements that meet the changing needs and regulatory requirements of the housing sector.
Gateshead-based ITPS, which has spent £500,000 on a series of high security datacentres across the North East, will host the solution at one of its tier-three data centres, with full replication at a second location to ensure business continuity.
The phased implementation of the project will begin in April 2011, led by a Prince 2 project manager and a dedicated Orchard team who will also be responsible for ongoing support services. The new housing management system is expected to be fully live by April 2012.
John Doughty, sales and marketing director, Orchard Information Systems, said, “As an award-winning ALMO in a large London borough, it faces some very particular challenges. We worked closely with the client team and user groups to design a managed service solution exactly around their needs. The result has all the flexibility and functionality of a bespoke system at a fraction of the cost. Having an expert hosting partner in ITPS means that we can also provide the business continuity reassurance of a fully-hosted service.
“The legacy system meant that CityWest was working with a range of information formats and sources, but once the implementation is complete it will have a truly integrated solution. This will give it a much better ability to extract business intelligence on service delivery and support the delivery of continual service improvements to its own clients, which was a key driver for the project.”
