Nottingham City Homes opts for simplicity by extending NEC Housing to assets, repairs and more

By replacing four separate systems and extending NEC Housing to new areas, they’re looking to reduce complexity, costs and constraints.

Making full use of NEC Housing

Nottingham City Homes (NCH) has used NEC Housing for many years and decided to refresh its approach. They’d been making small changes over time – like adding the self-service solution and CRM – but hadn’t really considered what else it could do.

They were also using separate systems for asset management, repairs, scheduling and mobile. This meant that if something went wrong, it could be hard to know where the issues were. And if they wanted to make big improvements, they’d have to change all five systems.

“Our strategic aim is simplicity. We wanted to reduce complexity, reduce costs and create a single point of contact. That’s why we opted for NEC Housing as our core strategic system.”

– Tony Sowter, Technical Innovation Manager

Extending the benefits in phases

NCH chose to extend its use of NEC Housing to improve compliance, support tenants at risk of arrears, achieve more on the move and make it easier to apply for homes.

Some of these improvements are already live:

• NEC Housing Assets is being used daily, with its data now available to everyone in a way it never was before;
• Housing Options is helping people to understand what services they’re eligible for, or signposts them to other organisations at an earlier stage if they aren’t;
• Account Analytics is building up a complete picture of rent payments, which will then help the team identify and support struggling tenants sooner;
• Stock Condition Surveys are being completed on the NEC Go-Mobile app, testing how it works ahead of a roll out to 300 trade colleagues later in the year.

There’s a range of other improvements in the pipeline too, like giving tenants the ability to upload documents from their smartphones.

Planning for the future

Tony explains their approach to what lies ahead:

“We’re moving from four systems to one, so we’re still planning that out really carefully. Once that’s done, we can start making the most of our new set-up and really change how we work. Like making it easy for tenants to book appointments, which should mean fewer calls and fewer visits.”