How to take a strategic view of your housing stock

Author: John Buckland, General Manager – Asset, MRI Software 

As part of my role, I regularly talk with senior asset management leaders about things they see coming down the road that will affect them going forward. Recently, many customers have expressed concerns to me over how to take a strategic approach towards planning.

In these conversations, it often becomes clear that customers are struggling to take a strategic view because they’re relying on systems which aren’t designed for the purpose of strategic asset management – instead, data is often cobbled together using spreadsheets and inputted into business planning software.

In this post, I’ll explain how a dedicated Asset Management Solution (AMS) can provide you with the best tools to support strategic decision making when it comes to managing your housing stock.

For an in-depth explanation of how an Asset Management Solution can support your organisation strategically, download our [e-book].  

The social housing organisations I talk to regularly discuss the need to take strategic view of several key areas:

• Carbon Reduction Measures

Addressing carbon emissions and energy efficiency continues to be a high priority for social housing asset management. However, identifying the most impactful measures can be a challenge.

Using modelling and “what-if” scenarios can help organisations to take a strategic approach to planning and implementing carbon reduction measures.

• Investment and improvement programme modelling

Another key focus area for asset management leaders is understanding the impact of different improvement programme approaches. For example, what’s the potential impact of reducing the lifetime of a kitchen from 20 years to 15, or installing boilers that only last 12 years?

Modelling different scenarios can help you understand the potential changes in cost and performance, and make the right decisions for the long term.

• Active Asset Management

Active Asset Management is a term that has come into more widespread use over the past few years, and describes a way of measuring the long term performance of properties, using modelling tools to analyse worth and how that changes depending on various hypothetical scenarios, such as conversion, investment, modernisation or replacement.

Active Asset Management requires social housing organisations to have a clear view of the impact of potential changes from both a monetary and social perspective, and to balance a range of different factors to inform long term strategic decision making.

The Right Tool For The Job?

While many social housing organisations are aware of the benefits of modelling for these types of scenarios, many struggle to access the right data to run the types of modelling they’d like to. Often, housing associations rely on a mixture of spreadsheets, manual data collection and business planning software to carry out this type of modelling. This can lead to a lack of synergy between systems, and is often a time-consuming and inefficient way of working.

Instead, these analyses would be far better managed using a good Asset Management Solution (AMS). An AMS should offer the functionality to allow for a range of scenario modelling, from measuring the impact of carbon reduction measures to improvement programme planning and active asset management.

Used well, a good AMS can help to improve your planning processes, create stronger, more robust business plans, and offer you a strategic approach to your asset management.

To find out more about Strategic Asset Management using an AMS, download our accompanying [e-book] for practical advice on choosing a system and using it to run asset management modelling for carbon reduction, improvement programme modelling and active asset management.

[Download the e-book now]