End-to-end housing repairs: Putting residents first

Moray Council improved resident experience with end-to-end digital transformation, combining the power of RPA and front-end digitisation. Creating a purpose-built app for tradespeople working in the field, allowing them to capture and access essential information from multiple systems, here’s how one council made social housing a priority with fantastic results.

The challenge

Within its social housing service, the council’s housing repairs process was originally paper-based, leading to several inefficiencies. When residents requested repairs, the Housing Service team would capture information on paper tickets, rekeying jobs for the direct labour organisation (DLO) into its NEC (iWorld) system – without any appointment or work scheduling systems to support it. This created several challenges, including:

• Jobs were randomly allocated, without giving residents the opportunity to share their availability, which led to higher levels of abortive visits
  
  
• Job tickets could not be updated or closed easily
  
  
• Tradespeople were spending a lot of time travelling from one area to another between jobs due to random allocation
  
  
• Lack of job visibility limited business intelligence, leading to over and under-purchasing of resources and materials – including third-party contractors

The solution

The council decided to revolutionise this process with end-to-end digital transformation – combining front-end technologies with RPA to streamline every step of housing repairs. Empowering its field workers with a purpose-built mobile app, and integrating relevant systems through automation, the project improved resident experience through these two key components.

Responsive repairs app
Unable to find a suitable solution off the shelf, the council worked closely with its tradespeople to build a bespoke mobile app for use out in the field. With offline working a key requirement, it created its Responsive Repairs app with Digitise module of NDL's Evolve Platform – allowing tradespeople to view jobs, update job status, record materials used, request additional labour and more.

System integration
To fully integrate new and existing systems with the app, the council opted to utilise the Automate module of NDL's Evolve Platform. Using RPA where APIs were too expensive or unavailable, the council was able to link its CRM, NEC iWorld and its material ordering systems together – eliminating rekeying and the need for paper tickets. It also connected an appointment scheduling system, allowing residents to choose a suitable appointment time for their requests.

The benefits

All of this contributes to greatly improved resident experience – meeting the council’s original aim. Residents can now raise requests, choose convenient timeslots, and access repairs quicker than ever before. 

• Response times better than the national average: Uplifting the process from end to end means the council now respond to repair requests faster than most other councils in the UK, providing better service for residents.
  
  
• Improved efficiency: The project delivers huge time savings for tradespeople, council administration staff and residents – eliminating rekeying and streamlining job allocation to ensure the fastest possible results.
  
  
• Greater intelligence: Visibility has greatly increased, allowing resources to be better allocated and inefficiencies to be identified and addressed.
  
  
• Financial savings: With improved efficiency and greater visibility, the council’s ‘in-house’ teams’ productivity has increased, with fewer tradespeople deployed on repairs than before.
  
  
• Environmental benefits: With jobs now allocated intelligently, tradespeople are travelling much less between jobs, resulting in a greatly reduced carbon footprint.

What’s next?

With the project’s success delivering powerful benefits for both residents and workers, the council plans to apply end-to-end transformation to several other processes across the organisation, while continuing to enhance the housing sector. The focus will shift next to strengthening environmental health and transportation through NDL Digitise, seamlessly integrating disparate systems and eliminating rekeying.

Moray Council have several projects in development with NDL Software going live in 2025.

To learn more about this story and how the Evolve Digital Transformation Platform could benefit your public sector organisation, don’t hesitate to get in touch with a member of the team.

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