Knowsley Housing Trust has choosen 1st Touch to deliver mobile solutions, integrated with IBS OPENHousing and OPTI-TIME scheduling systems.

Knowsley Housing Trust (KHT) manages over 13,000 high quality homes at affordable rents. It has a range of housing stock which includes houses, bungalows, sheltered housing schemes, as well as low rise and multi-storey accommodation.

KHT's commercial arm, KHT Services, also provides maintenance services for other public sector organisations.

KHT has a mobile workforce of over two hundred and twenty operatives. These operatives cover four contracts for work over a wide geographic area. The workforce is split into multiple trades and disciplines, including responsive repairs, gas servicing, voids and electrical.

The business case for mobilising the workforce was overwhelming. An earlier project to introduce mobile working had met with mixed success and there had been technical integration issues.

A key requirement for the Trust was for a solution that interfaced in real time with the scheduling system OPTI-TIME from Xmbrace and the IBS OPENHousing system currently in use at the Trust.

The system needed to give and capture data from and to the operative, including relevant up to date information for all of the business areas being mobilised.

KHT also wanted to be independent of the mobile software supplier for forms changes after they were live.

KHT decided to look at the marketplace for mobile working again and selected 1st Touch Mobile, a solution that has already been implemented in thirty-five similar Social Housing organisations.

The ready to use 1st Touch Social Housing applications cater for all of the business areas KHT required and were referenceable. Specifically, KHT will use 1st touch Mobile solutions for Responsive Repairs. Gas Servicing, Voids, Van Checks and Van Stock Management.

Importantly, 1st Touch has been fully integrated with IBS OPENHousing, meaning that data is exchanged between the two systems, adding to the efficiency of the operation and reducing the associated costs of running disparate systems.

Integration to housing management solutions is normally high cost and high risk with significant risk of failure. 1st Touch has built a reusable integration layer which calls standard IBS Business Logic routines which are fully supported by IBS, in real time for a timely and low cost integration.

Telephone: 0871 716 3060

Back to the index for this section...

Something to add to Spotlight - please get in touch