DOWNLOAD the Case Study

To download the pdf version of this Business Intelligence Case Study, please click here.

FIND OUT MORE

Want to know more about Dashboards and our associated Business Intelligence services?

Visit our Business Intelligence section, or contact us on:

enquiries@processflows.co.uk

+44 (0)1962 835053

Bernicia Group – a Business Intelligence Case Study

March 26, 2014

Housing Management Business Intelligence

The Bernicia Group is using ProcessFlows Business Intelligence Dashboard Software to access and display previously hard-to-find information relating to housing letting arrears, repairs and maintenance and suppliers. As well as clearing the ‘data fog’, Dashboards have enabled Bernicia to visualise key data for the entire organisation and improve accessibility to information from multiple line of business systems.

Managing 20,000 properties in the Newcastle area

North East based Housing Association, Bernicia Group, manages 8,000 owned rental homes and 12,000 leasehold properties in and around Newcastle. Gary Hind, Head of IT at Bernicia said; “Outstanding customer service and quality are cornerstones of our organisation, so it’s imperative that we can monitor our performance accurately and focus on critical areas that need immediate attention.”

Easier access to information

Where possible, Bernicia has automated their back office processes to improve efficiency and customer service. Their automated accounts payable process (AP ProcessFlows), supplied and implemented by ProcessFlows, has enabled Bernicia to reduce the time taken to process a supplier invoice from two weeks to just two days. AP ProcessFlows provides electronic access to information at every stage of the AP process; saving Bernicia’s AP staff many frustrating working hours, allowing more accurate cash flow forecasting and enhancing supplier relationships.

Rental arrears and repairs and maintenance

Minimising the number of rental arrears is a key business strategy. Being able to see which tenants are late with their rent and possession of the most up to date overdue rental figures is essential collateral for Housing Officers monitoring KPIs. If Officers can identify irregularities, such as a prompt-paying tenant suddenly being overdue with their rent, they can act quickly to resolve things. Such information will also help to identify trends and areas in which improvements can be made. Similarly, data can reveal recurring problems which are not deemed significant by disparate maintenance and repair teams dealing with them individually and would therefore go unnoticed. Gary Hind commented;

Gathering information for analysis is a challenge. We don’t have a set methodology for reporting. We gathered data from numerous databases and spreadsheets, which was time-consuming to collate and present. It was difficult to achieve a consistent view of our performance as information was disconnected. Finding a way to bring together and display data would empower our Housing Officers to make well informed, timely decisions.

Building on SharePoint was proving difficult

Gary Hind had some experience designing and generating reports using Crystal Reports, but on this occasion, he felt that a more powerful tool, which could provide BI functionality for the entire organisation, was needed. Building all the features they required in SharePoint, to include data retrieval, visualisation, analysis, self-service search functionality and tight security was going to take up a large chunk of IT development time in the first instance and then require ongoing IT support. Gary didn’t have this spare resource.

ProcessFlows Dashboards

ProcessFlows’ Business Intelligence Dashboards fully met Bernicia’s requirements for a BI solution:

  • Ease of integration with multiple, existing applications
  • Quick to install – install in a day and be up and running the next
  • Intuitive for new users to grasp with little or no training
  • Affordability – compared to other BI solutions, Dashboards is much more affordable with regard to licensing costs.

Multiple integrations

Dashboards is integrated with Bernicia’s Civica Housing and Servitor repairs management systems, Sun finance and OnBase document management systems. It enables users across multiple departments to access and present the data they need for reporting and KPI monitoring, in an easy-to-understand, interactive dashboard format which can be queried, manipulated and drilled into for comparison and historic analysis.

Improved service delivery to tenants

Gary Hind comments;

Dashboards plugged very easily into our existing applications. Without too much technical support from IT, users were able to produce professional looking results and Dashboards that worked first time. The ability to review our historical performance, as well as visualising a forward-looking perspective, makes Dashboards an extremely powerful business planning tool.

An added and unexpected benefit

Gary Hind said that implementing Dashboards was just the catalyst they needed to initiate the data warehouse project that had been on IT’s to-do list for a while. Dashboards enabled Bernicia to access and collate the data and then drag and drop it into the data warehouse, so the task was completed relatively quickly. John Harrison, IT Governance and Project Manager at Bernicia, summarised;

ProcessFlows Dashboards is extremely straightforward to use, delivering customised, graphical views of our key information and allowing us to drill-down to analyse data more deeply with just a few mouse clicks. We now have instant access to the key information required by our users to interpret and act on our data. As a result of implementing ProcessFlows Dashboards, it has become easier to construct a singular corporate view of our performance, which will enable us to better identify areas that we can improve on.

To download the Case Study and for more information, please see above left.

Quick Contact