Customers

Bromford Housing

"The delivery of social housing across the UK is highly performance driven. Bromford Housing Group's investment in Crystal Reports from Business Objects is providing rapid web-based access to the key performance indicators that will underpin our strategic growth objective and provide the day to day information required to manage both housing stock and service delivery effectively."

Steve Percival
group director of information services
Bromford Housing Group

Challenge

The social housing sector is experiencing a period of significant change, with registered social landlords (RSL) increasingly consolidating in a bid to rationalize the cost base and deliver improved service and quality to tenants.

Bromford Housing Group is dedicated to the provision of affordable housing and associated care and support services. The not for profit organisation manages or provides support to over 19,000 homes across Central England and the South West. Founded in 1963, the group is building over 800 new homes a year and has an annual turnover of £59 million.

The group has ambitious growth plans, aiming to create a new group structure by 2010 and establish Bromford Housing as Central England's leading RSL. At the same time the group has to manage its housing stock against increasingly stringent performance indicators set by the Housing Corporation.

To support this strategic plan, Bromford Housing is currently undertaking a major overhaul of its IT infrastructure, updating its core asset management and repair system - ActiveH from MIS Active Management - to the latest SQL server-based technology. At the same time, Bromford Housing is implementing a robust business intelligence solution designed to support both day to day operations and inform strategic direction.

"The objective is to create a trusted information source that provides high level key performance indicator (KPI) tracking at group level as well as the ability to drill down into detailed information to support day to day decision making," says Steve Percival, head of IS, Bromford Housing Group.

Approach

Bromford Housing has been working with Business Objects partner Blueprint Management Systems to create a single source of trusted information. "Bromford Housing needs a business intelligence infrastructure that enables simple, Web-based information access for every one of the 600 people in the organization. Furthermore, the solution must scale to support the business as it grows," says Percival.

Blueprint recommended Crystal Reports, the award-winning reporting tool from Business Objects, that enables organizations to create flexible, feature-rich reports and integrate them into Web and Windows applications that can be delivered inside and outside the organization.

Crystal Reports provides Bromford with intranet access to information held within a SQL server data warehouse. In the proof-of-concept project, asset information from ActiveH can be analyzed in 20 dimensions, including property type, average rent, and number of bed spaces.

"Crystal Reports is so easy to use; users can go to the intranet, point-and-click with the browser and get the information they need. Training takes a matter of minutes," says Percival. "From a development stand point, the numerous in-built shortcuts, such as trend indicators, enabled Bromford to get an application up and running very quickly."

Throughout the project, Blueprint worked closely with the IS team at Bromford Housing to enable knowledge transfer, ensuring the group can continue to exploit its investment in Crystal Reports to support the organization's requirements moving forward. Over the next few months, the group plans to add information from the Ciphr HR solution as well as the CRM and repairs management modules of ActiveH into the data warehouse.

Results

The implementation of Crystal Reports is closely aligned with Bromford Housing's KPIs. The first area addressed, assets under management, is providing users with immediate access to both KPIs and day-to-day reporting requirements.

Using the multi-dimensional analysis, users can immediately ascertain, for example: the number of properties in a specific area that are ground floor, wheelchair enabled, with a rent under a specific value.

The KPIs of a number of properties in management and number of new properties added each month, are now available in trend graphs, with users able to drill down into further information to understand the distribution of those properties.

Future phases of the business intelligence project will address customer relationship management, property maintenance, and staff turnover. Crystal Reports will deliver a number of benefits:

Percival concludes, "With Crystal Reports Bromford Housing now has a highly scalable business intelligence solution that will support the evolution of the group structure and enable rapid consolidation of information in the event of future mergers."

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