September 2013 - Bron Afon

the needs of Bron Afon and our tenants particularly in the light of welfare
reform. We have taken into account the experience we have had in the Direct
Payments Demonstration Project and also have many conversations with
other organisations about the systems they use. At a recent conference of
welfare reform attended by the Chief Executive, there were senior managers
there from over thirty Housing Associations in England who were scathing
about the systems available, some of which have been in use in England for
some time, and their lack of functionality in terms of coping with the
complexity of welfare reform and Universal Credit in particular. We are
working with a company called Mobysoft who provide a tool called Rentsense
to analyse rent arrears cases and they have acknowledged that we are ahead
of the field in terms of the level of analysis we are asking for about rent cases
so that we can assess the risk posed to tenants on the sustainability of their
tenancies.
6.3 So when we have looked at the housing systems we haven’t found one that is
suitable to meet the current needs including the need for flexibility and the
ability to redesign quite easily as circumstances change or the needs of the
business alter. As a result of the review, the best option was to design
modules ourselves for a Customer Relationship Management system based
on software known as Microsoft Dynamics. The resources and change
management required to develop the systems we required have been
targeted at the priority area of under occupation in the early part of this year
and that module is now operational.
6.4 A major corporate project has been in progress and will continue (probably
indefinitely) to design and deliver the changes required. There has been a
huge amount of input from across the business in terms of the data we need
to capture to deliver services particularly in the light of welfare reform and our
experience of the Demonstration Project. You will also recall that in April,
Cath Stenson reported on the development of the new support service and
the intention to use a triage system to identify the level of needs of individual
tenants. This will also require data to enable us to assess the level of contact
that different tenants require and have with us.
6.5 Members of the Board or Membership Committee who would like to have a
demonstration of the CRM and its operations within Supported Living or in
under occupation cases are very welcome to do so and we can set up a
session for the Board before a Board meeting if that would be convenient.
6.6 The current development stage for the CRM will see its use by everyone in
the business to record all customer contact and a system that can record key
data we require for all tenants and leaseholders. We have just finalised the
data requirements to enable the software programming to be started and we
aim to have a system ready for implementation in January in phases. Over
200 staff will need training before this system is in use everywhere.
6.7 Choices will need to be made about how we collect data from our
tenants and record their willingness for us to use the data to populate
the system once it is designed. We also need to decide how
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