Scottish Borders Housing Association (SBHA) was set up three years ago as a non-profit organisation to manage council housing in the Scottish Borders. The local council, which was managing council properties in the area prior to this, did not have the resource to maintain them to a sufficient standard, and residents voted for a buy-out of the council properties by a housing association. SBHA was formed to provide this service. The rapid turnaround of maintenance work on its properties was one of its main priorities.

SBHA employed the services of the council’s existing repair and maintenance team, which consisted of 53 plumbers, electricians and carpenters responsible for everything from repairing burst pipes to fitting smoke alarms in the 6,300 residential properties and 1,400 garages now owned and managed by SBHA.

‘Our aim was to get straight to work on the maintenance of the properties we managed,’ says Paul Bonser, Information Systems Project Manager for SBHA. ‘Having been voted in by the residents of the area, we had to prove our worth to them quickly, and show that we could provide them with a better service than the council had done in previous years.’

The challenge
With its head office in Selkirk, SBHA also had depots in Peebles, Kelso, Hawick and Galashiels. Members of the maintenance team would leave their homes in the morning, drive to the their nearest depot, collect their job sheets for the day, drive to each job, and then return to the depot to deposit their paperwork at the end of the day before driving home again.

Scheduling appointments with residents was always a problem as it was difficult for the maintenance team to know how long each job would take them and thus what time they would be available. Residents would often have to wait at home for hours over many days for the appropriate team member to arrive, and if they were delayed at a previous job, the workmen would sometimes arrive to find they could not access a property because the resident couldn’t wait any longer and had left.

This system clearly did not offer the most efficient use of the maintenance team’s time, with several hours per day being used up with unnecessary travel, fruitless house calls and laborious administrative tasks. Action was needed and, accordingly, it was decided that some kind of formal maintenance regime was required around which to better manage these processes – a real-time system to reduce call-out waiting times and to increase the efficiency of the repair and maintenance team.

SBHA’s information systems team quickly saw the need for a more structured job-scheduling system, and approached Xmbrace, a provider of specialist solutions to the housing repairs sector. Whilst researching Xmbrace’s Opti-Time solution, SBHA realised that in addition to implementing job-scheduling software, they would need to run that software over a managed mobile data solution in order to ensure the maximum benefit to the maintenance team.

Xmbrace immediately recommended Cognito’s Activus managed mobile data solution to be used in conjunction with its own job-scheduling software, following previous successful partnerships and implementations.

David Todd, CEO of Xmbrace, says, ‘As confident as we are in the success of our Opti-Time solution, we have repeatedly seen it best used in conjunction with a managed mobile solution, such as Activus from Cognito. Our customers have demonstrated the greatest return on investment when this joint solution has been deployed.’

The solution
SBHA chose Cognito’s service for two key reasons. Working in remote regions where GPRS coverage is not always available, SBHA needed a system that would fully audit messages going backwards and forwards between the scheduling depot and the maintenance team in order to effectively track communications. Secondly, with a team of only four people in their IT department, SBHA needed a service that could be fully managed from start to finish by the company providing the solution. Cognito’s solution was the only one available that could offer this level of service.

The Cognito solution is a real-time communications system, utilising a transactional model as opposed to the more complex synchronisation technology, which enables data to be pushed and pulled, and using GPRS as the transport mechanism. The service runs on a connectionless model, removing the need for mobile workers to connect directly into back-office systems. All access to the network is controlled by a series of authentication checks, carried out discretely without user intervention and working on a series of rolling passwords that check, in the case of mobile access, the validity of user ID, hardware, and SIM details.

The Cognito Activus service features dedicated fixed links into each of the UK mobile GPRS networks, with a back-up GSM system in the event that GPRS coverage is temporarily unavailable. SBHA already had a government contract with Vodafone to supply voice calls, so Cognito simply worked with Vodafone to extend this service.

Cognito provides both the back office communication mechanism and the handsets as a fully managed and supported service, delivering this over the Vodafone GPRS/GSM network on VPA Compact PDA units, and thus enabling real-time communication between the call centre and the maintenance team operating across the Borders area. Xmbrace delivers the appointments diary and work scheduling system to the mobile handsets.

The implementation
Implementation of the Cognito and Xmbrace solutions began in September 2005. The maintenance team performed a one-week trial of the new solution before Christmas, and gave their feedback to the Cognito team.

‘The team had a few issues with the on-screen display of the job-scheduling software. Their feedback from the trial was given to Cognito, and tweaks to the system were turned around and implemented in a matter of days. This not only gave us a bespoke solution for our needs, but also showed our maintenance team that we truly valued their feedback, as they could actually see their suggestions and feedback come to life in the solution, ‘ says Paul. ‘Cognito and Xmbrace both have excellent technical teams, who worked together fantastically to ensure we had the best possible solution for our needs. Cognito’s managed service support is first rate.’

Following a few tweaks to the system, the rollout was completed in January 2006. Cognito provided full training on its service to SBHA’s IT team, and also to the maintenance team.

‘Our maintenance team consists of 53 people who differ greatly in skills, age and technical knowledge,’ explains Paul. ‘Cognito’s training was superb. It was very professional, and successfully encompassed the needs and skills of the group in one united session, with exactly the support and encouragement that they needed.’

Results
Members of the maintenance team now start their day by accessing their allocated job details at home via their PDAs. Where possible, their first job of the day is close to their home, and they travel straight there rather than going via the depot. They continue to move from job to job throughout the day and their final call will invariably be somewhere close to home again, meaning they won’t have a lengthy journey at the end of their working day.

In addition, the real-time nature of the job scheduling means that, where necessary, residents can be given specific appointment times for the maintenance team to visit. This ensures minimum inconvenience to the residents, as they don’t need to stay at home waiting for the relevant person to arrive, and also means that the maintenance team can gain access to properties upon arrival.

‘Specific return on investment has not yet been fully gauged’, says Paul, ‘but there has already been a marked difference in performance. Within 6 weeks of implementation, meeting the turnaround time for responding to call-outs has reached almost 100%.’

The efficient use of the maintenance team’s time has also meant that they have extra resource available for less urgent jobs, such as planned maintenance and checking empty properties between tenancies, meaning SBHA no longer needs to sub-contract this work out to third party companies.

‘The maintenance team has fully embraced the Cognito service, and members of the team are particularly pleased about the reduction in paperwork that has come about as a result of the implementation’, says Paul.

The future
SBHA is currently looking at expanding the use of the Cognito service to its property maintenance officers (PMOs), who are responsible for ensuring that properties meet strict targets and key performance indicators to which they must adhere. Implementing the service for PMOs would mean they could send requests for maintenance work directly to SBHA’s Selkirk job-scheduling depot and have a member of the maintenance team on-site on the same day if necessary, rather than having to wait for the maintenance officers to return to their own offices to file a request.

‘We’re delighted with the improvements we have seen in our service since the new system was introduced. Cognito handled the entire rollout and configuration of the mobile devices just as they said they would,’ says Paul. ‘They did exactly what it said on the tin. Moreover, the Cognito solution has provided Scottish Borders residents with the first-class, responsive repairs and maintenance support service they needed.’