Soha has opted for Aareon QL to support its business in all aspects of tenant and property information. In addition to providing better housing and asset management functionality, Aareon QL will improve Soha’s CRM abilities, enable the creation of a new self-service portal, and support more advanced mobile working.
The QL implementation project began in February 2016, with input from the IT department. In August 2016, a business-wide dedicated implementation group, the ‘systems revolution team’, was established to review business processes and configure the system to meet future business needs.
Nasreen Hussain, director of finance and resources, Soha Housing, said, “IT is a vital element in managing our business and can be seen as one of the key factors of production. So any new system had to meet tough criteria and the whole procurement process involved staff from across the organisation.
“We felt that Aareon and its QL housing management system offered the best solution as it’s a fully-integrated system. Looking ahead, we will be using QL for every possible business process.”
From the initial project kick-off, Aareon allocated Soha a dedicated project manager, Steve Bromley from Bromley Consulting, who had previously worked in the social housing field and was responsible for managing resources, planning and delivering the project on time, within budget and to quality standards.
As part of every Aareon implementation, a dedicated project website was set up for both project teams to use as a central project management facility. Meetings and key milestones could be added, to-do lists created and allocated to team members, and workshop notes and actions arising from all meeting stored on the site. The project website was used on a daily basis as the main communication method because all emails could be sent, stored and tracked, giving both teams complete transparency throughout the project.
Stephen Bromley, director, Bromley Consulting, said, “Having worked on a number of implementation projects, I must say that the go-live period at Soha was the smoothest that I have been involved with.
Soha set a challenging target in terms of when the system was to be live, but I was pleased that they recognised the scale of the resources that were needed and seconded staff where necessary to work full time on the project.”
As an addendum, Aareon has reported that Nasreen Hussain, Soha Housing’s director of finance and resources, has recently taken on the role of chair of the Aareon QL user group.
