New Product Announcement: Service Charges

Posted on by jlewis

At MRI Software, we have been exploring how the fundamental process of managing housing stock could be improved for teams and how we can assist housing providers around the incoming regulatory need for transparency.

Our latest solution, Service Charges, combines the expertise of the heritage brands that make up MRI Social Housing with the best of MRI Software technology. The past year has been spent examining the service charges offering of these heritage brands and assessing the capabilities that we have available, as well as what we feel we should be offering the sector.

Why is Service Charges a priority?

After extensive consultation with our clients around their expectations and hopes for a system, it was established that the right way forward was to build a new solution that would incorporate all the functions they relied upon in the heritage products. For many of our clients, this was an opportunity to review the data that they hold in disparate systems and to think about implementing something new.

Through this process of consultation, it became apparent that there was a real opportunity within the social housing sector for a strong standalone service charges solution. The main driver for our clients was developing a system that would integrate seamlessly with their housing and finance management systems.

Following our clients’ feedback, housing providers can expect the functionality of the Service Charges solution to include elements, such as:

  • Data migration from selected modules
  • Expenses and structures that can mirror other systems and integrate with them
  • Or, for providers whose structure includes more than housing, expenses that can be managed as standalone items

Core principles of the Service Charges product

Alongside the primary goal of delivering an integrated product, one objective of the solution is to eliminate swathes of manual processing that might be prone to human error. To support use, Service Charges will be an easily configurable system with an intuitive user interface, developed to be accessible and simple to use.

Importantly, workflow in the solution is organised to drive users to the most pressing actions, preparing teams for the day. Ease of use is one of the core principles shared across our systems and in aligning their styles, our aim is to deliver a consistent experience for users of multiple MRI solutions.

The ability to report well

How a housing provider spends its income and service charge payments is going to come under increased scrutiny in the near future. The Charter for Social Housing made clear that “service charges should be transparent and communicated effectively, and that there should be a route to challenge or redress if things go wrong.”

Consultation with social housing residents by the government mirrored our own research around the belief from residents that service charges can be unclear. This can lead to a lack of clarity as to how residents’ money is spent, whether they receive the services they are charged for and whether the prices are reasonable. This, in turn can fundamentally damage trust in an organisation. Our Service Charges solution allows housing providers to drill into the detail of their service charges and evidence where they are being spent.

Built with the sector, for the sector

In our workshops with clients, we have tested the delivery of the solution in phases, asking them whether we’ve got right, if any key functionality has been missed and what the order of priority should be for the building of product features. Our approach in building our solutions is to work with individual providers and tailor implementations to their needs.

And it doesn’t stop there. These consultations will continue as the system progresses to ensure that the solution is continually improving and that we’re building the solution that the sector deserves.

Phase one: initial release

Phase one of the Service Charges solution is planned for delivery across the last quarter of 2021. The initial release will include a plethora of functionalities, including the ability to manage payments and arrears, to apportion and approve estimates and to report.

From December 2021, implementations will begin with existing users of our Housing Enterprise solution.

Phase two: additional functionality

From 2022, the solution will move forward in an agile way, delivering regular releases. We will be growing our user groups and actively seeking our clients to feed input into the product’s roadmap. The solutions will be further enhanced through integration with existing products and additional features, such as managing meter readings and resident enquiries.

Our hope for the solution

Service charges are a core element of providing housing. At their best, service charges systems within an organisation provide efficiency, transparency, assist decision making and ensure no elements are unaccounted for. Through our Service Charges solution, we are looking to drive technological innovation in the sector that can support teams in building thriving communities and sustainable tenancies.

The launch of our Service Charges solution has already piqued the interest of housing providers and is due to launch soon with our pilot partners. If you’re interested in how the system could support your own processes, please get in contact with your particular timescales and personal implementation needs at socialhousing@mrisoftware.com, so that we can make sure that we are able to accommodate you with your Service Charges journey.

Become a data visionary: Four questions to ask your analytical team to future-proof your investment strategies

Posted on by dlewis

It’s unlikely that anybody could have predicted the real estate market shifts over the past 12 months. As in many other industries, it’s likely that the landscape is forever changed, and the real estate industry can expect to face some further curve balls in the coming months and years.

To navigate the road ahead, it’s vital that real estate investment management firms have the tools and processes in place to allow for confident decision making and a visionary approach to long-term strategy. All too often, firms’ ability to anticipate and plan for the future is limited by inadequate processes and out-of-date tools.

There’s never been a better time to review your approach to data and analytics, and to ask some tough questions about whether long standing processes are still fit for purpose, or whether they might be holding your most insightful decision makers back.

The discussion points below provide a starting point for identifying gaps in your current analytical approach and implementing changes that will not only allow you to adapt and respond more rapidly to future unforeseen events, but to operate more efficiently and effectively in real-time too.

How much are we spending to report on “what is”?

Historically, the most important challenge for strategic planning was collecting and aggregating data from multiple disparate sources. Early real estate software was typically designed as a closed system with limited connectivity, requiring analysts to output data from property management systems and combine it manually with market data, valuation details and third-party benchmarking sources to provide the core data sets on which to base investment models.

As the market has become more sophisticated, and as investors have become ever more demanding in the granularity of reporting data they expect from their management companies, the workload required just to build these “what’s happening now” data sets manually is overwhelming.

Technology providers have responded to the requirement from their clients for a more connected data ecosystem by investing in API’s and other web services to allow integration between not just systems designed by the same provider, but a much wider range of tools and data sources, from multiple suppliers.

This open and connected ethos opens up significant opportunities for real estate investment firms to save time and improve efficiency in their data gathering and base case reporting. By increasing the speed at which your team can get a clear picture of “what is”, your team is free to focus on “what will be”.

How many potential points of failure are there in our data analysis process?

Not only does collecting and collating this “base case” data manually in spreadsheets take a disproportionate amount of time, it also introduces multiple points of failure where inaccuracies can creep in. Every human intervention in data processing increases the risk of errors, whether through inaccurate data entry or incorrect modifications to calculation functions in a modelling spreadsheet – and when mistakes do crop up, it’s often near impossible to follow an audit trail to figure out exactly what’s gone wrong.

Errors can build up over time, skewing data and leading to unknown levels of inaccuracy in modelling calculations. There’s a laundry-list of examples of Excel mistakes leading to significant financial and reputational damage for businesses depending too heavily on spreadsheet calculations for major business decisions, from Fidelity’s $2.6 billion mistake when calculating dividend distributions for its Magellan fund to the more recent UK government COVID testing debacle.

Streamlining and automating data gathering is not just a time saver, but a vital risk reduction process. By relying on established, tested software and API’s with a robust audit trail, real estate investment firms can have confidence in the data on which they’re basing critical business decisions.

Are our data team analysts, or just data wranglers?

Data analytics and business intelligence hires are high on the priority list for real estate investment firms, and with good reason – the ability of a company to insightfully analyse data, spot trends and make timely strategic decisions is a key differentiator, and data wizards are rightly regarded as being key to this.

Too often, though, firms bring in talented individuals only to have them hamstrung by convoluted processes and poor-quality data, turning visionary analysts into data wranglers who spend so much time collecting data and reporting on “what is” that they have no time to plan for “what will be”.

As millennials and Gen Z employees enter the workforce, this not only limits companies’ performance but affects their employee engagement and retention, too – younger employees’ expectations for intuitiveness, integration and user experience are sky-high as standard, and employers who don’t supply the right toolkit can struggle to retain talented new hires, particularly as younger generations already expect to switch jobs more frequently than their older colleagues.

For real estate investment managers, identifying the appropriate suite of technology to minimise resource usage on rote data management allows analysts to focus their energies on building the most realistic, profitable and successful strategic plan for your portfolio – getting the maximum value out of their data teams and keeping them engaged and productive.

How long does it take to remodel our projections for a new scenario?

Having the right data management tools in place gives real estate investment managers the agility to pivot in the face of changing situations – whether COVID-level or more commonplace. Just as firms should be relying on technology to map, aggregate, normalise and report on data, they must also look to technology to streamline their processing calculations.

In the bad old days of Excel-based investment modelling, it could take a team of analysts weeks to produce financial and strategic plans based on a specific set of assumptions. Should the board then wish to explore a slightly different set of assumptions, the entire process started again, meaning that by the time insight was available, the opportunity had most likely passed.

With modern business intelligence and modelling tools such as MRI Investment Modelling, AI and robotic process automation can make short work of these types of calculations, reducing the time required to adjust scenarios from weeks to mere minutes. Not only do these systems provide data that’s more reliable and less error-prone, they also put critical business insights in front of senior teams quickly, allowing them to take decisive action and maximise new opportunities.

Become a RE:Visionary with MRI

At MRI, we know that our customers need robust, connected software solutions to achieve their strategic objectives, leveraging cutting-edge technology to become true data visionaries. Get in touch find out more about how our solutions can help you streamline processes, connect your tech, and ultimately unleash the visionary in you.

This blog was originally featured in the EG UK Cities Investor Guide 2021, published 3, June 2021. Read more here.

Social housing and the Internet of Things (IoT)

Posted on by MRI Social Housing

The proliferation of IoT devices and sensors in social homes has the capacity to improve housing provision in three core ways; by integrating real-time data to improve asset safety, by making broad cost-savings via operational efficiencies as services become less reactive, and by improving the communication between residents and providers to support sustainable tenancies.

To date, the take-up of IoT technologies by social housing providers has been cautious.  By 2019, only 20% had implemented a solution in more than 100 homes. Factors that are accelerating implementation across the sector include successful case studies emerging from early adopters, as seen with MRI client, Housing Solutions who implemented an AI customer portal. The portal has greatly reduced time spent by officers on day-to-day functions, leaving them able to spend time on cases in need of more support.

Expected changes in the regulatory environment will also drive IoT uptake to improve safety and resident experience. The Building Safety Bill will mandate that each organisation has a ‘chosen person’ who bears responsibility for ‘The Golden Thread’ of asset information, necessitating better digital records of buildings. Furthermore, those trying to get ahead by adopting further digital infrastructure will be influenced by the recommendations made by The Hackitt Review for ensuring building safety.

IoT can be deployed across social housing in many shapes and sizes. Examples range from AI communications to smart locks, leak detectors, smart meters, fire door safety, smoke alarms, environmental sensors, smart boilers and smart lighting.

Environmental sensors can help improve safety and service in homes. By tracking information related to temperature and humidity, housing providers can compare poorly performing homes against data around a resident’s financial vulnerability. Identifying those at risk of fuel poverty can assist teams in creating personalised plans based on evidence to improve the resident experience.

For housing providers looking to utilise IoT, three key factors should be considered:

  1. Embedding connected homes will drive cost efficiency and contribute carbon saving goals
  2. Without a plan for IoT, any organisation’s digital transformation faces further disruption; action now will reap benefits sooner
  3. Residents can be empowered by being given transparency over how their home performs 

Data standards and compliance

In our first Data Revolution breakfast meeting, Phil Brining, from Data Protection People warned the housing sector about careful adoption of connected homes: “I would fully expect a revision to the privacy and electronic communication regulations (the PECR) to follow, to ensure that British data protection laws remain broadly equivalent to those in the EU. Privacy regulation brings under its scope IoT devices; regulatory change is likely on its way for the Internet of Things.” For more of Phil’s insights, you can read The Data Revolution e-book here.

Social Housing and the Internet of Things

If a housing provider cannot explain what a sensor or smart meter device does in a resident’s home, how it benefits both the housing provider and the resident, and how that data will be collected, stored and protected, it shouldn’t be deployed and could in fact, damage trust in a provider. For Maryhill Housing in Glasgow, including tenants in the journey was fundamental to their IoT strategy. Alongside the provision of high-speed fibre optic internet, free classes were provided to residents to increase digital inclusion.

The adoption of IoT devices can drive inclusive design within an organisation. Residents with mobility needs for example, can be provided with the control of lighting or temperature from wherever they are in their homes. Smart sensors, planned well, can serve to greatly improve the quality of life for those who need it – but could benefit everybody. Installing systems that work for all residents can also save on some costly adaptations.

Giving residents access to smart home technology can create a more collaborative relationship between social housing organisations and their residents, empowering both with the tools and data so they can share the responsibility of efficiently managing and maintaining their homes.

HACT, Do the Smart Thing

Smart locks are another way in which IoT can improve a resident’s experience in their home. In the simplest of ways, if keys are lost then residents can be granted access to their home remotely. Operatives can also be let into a home without the residents needing to be present in order to carry out routine safety checks. And as housing teams may continue to work remotely, smart locks could also enable local officers to perform a welfare check if concerns are raised.

Improving communications: Housing Solutions

Housing Solutions rolled out 4,500 Amazon Alexa devices to residents, in order to establish an AI platform that would provide 24/7 real-time interaction with residents around day-to-day activities such as allowing tenants to make routine requests, enquire about rent-balance enquiries, log repairs and update their personal information. In doing so, they were able to free up officer time for residents needing more support. Like Maryhill in Glasgow, Housing Solutions also improved their Wi-Fi provision to make sure all residents had access to this scheme.

Under this scheme, residents have been able to request calls from officers at their leisure, eliminating time spent in hold queues and giving them a hands-free path to communicate with their housing provider. Through the scheme, Housing Solutions could identify the most popular topics being asked, which have all now been fully automated, minimising the time spent answering these simpler questions.

Joining the data dots

Looking to the future, the better served assets are by a digital feedback loop, facilitated by the IoT, the broader the impact and business intelligence they can harvest. As this environment is rolled out across sectors, there will more opportunities for joint working. Plans from the Cambridge Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDDB) envisage digital twins that securely feed a National Digital Twin to eventually allow the integration of data between service providers.

An example of this further down the line could be collaborations between housing organisations and water companies that safely share data in order to model which homes could be susceptible to floods and kick-start preventative works to protect those homes.

The Internet of Things (IoT) can enable efficiencies for operations and maintenance, but it’s the promise of analytics that offers the most business benefits. The enhanced technology around analytics detects patterns and trends, allowing you to make more intelligent decisions about the business moving forward. Uncertainty is driving firms to look toward best-in-class innovations that offer predictive analytics, fuelling the demand for long-term portfolio planning, risk mitigation and streamlined strategic planning.

Brian Zrimsek, MRI’s resident subject matter expert on real-estate tech

At a consumer level, smart devices can streamline activities, saving money and time and making homes easier to live in. However, at scale, the possibilities for organisations to improve their processes and services, moving operations towards proactive rather than reactive change, are vast and in the future, could help connect previously siloed sectors and environments.

Planning for the future with FP&A technology

Posted on by MRI

This article was co-written by Brian Zrimsek, Industry Principal, and Arik Kogan, Vice President of Financial and Investment Solutions at MRI Software.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created the most challenging planning and forecasting moment for real estate investors since the Great Recession from over a decade ago. In comparison, the current period is both broader and deeper in its impact on real estate, creating substantial needs for technology to help (re)forecast 2021 and the next few years, in spite of all of the unknowns.

What makes this challenge more complicated for the real estate industry?

Unlike other market downturns in recent memory, there is a uniquely human element to the one that has acutely impacted the real estate investment landscape since March 2020. With the turbulence of the last year behind us, Green Street is already noting a valuation recovery and pointing to a continued positive trend.

Global transaction volume hit record lows through 2020 (anywhere from 13% to 61% across various regions, according to JLL), but these numbers were brought down primarily by asset classes that investors do not believe will bounce back hard and fast in the post-COVID global economy. There is plenty of capital available to be deployed, and while office and retail transactions have been limited, other asset classes, like apartments, student housing, and hotels, are being sourced and acquired eagerly by private equity investors.

How to create opportunity out of the challenge

These phenomena affecting the market, and core assets in particular, create an unprecedented challenge for investors, but also an incredible opportunity for those equipped to navigate it effectively. Strategic planning through this pandemic is not just an exercise in economics and math, but an intricate web created by the intersection of the market with human beings. We will be working from home. We will be shopping online. And when we don’t, we want health, safety, sustainability and an experience worthy of the effort.

As more factors, data points, and potential scenarios come into play for real estate investors looking to make quick and confident decisions, modern technology has become table stakes. For short-term planning and forecasting, integrated planning and budgeting tools make quick work of using past periods to drive future period forecasts, while providing for both general and specific assumptions to be put into specific planning scenarios and then rolled forward from one period to the next.

Driving multiple scenarios is important given the lingering uncertainty, allowing leaders to understand the likely bounds of the playing field in front of them.

Short-term, operational plans should then be used as inputs to longer-term planning processes. With a strong basis in operational realities, longer-term plans can be more reliable for further scenarios and strategic planning, including:

  • Planning cash flow in support of expense or capital activities
  • Identifying debt covenant opportunities or issues
  • Projecting valuations as part of acquisition and disposition scenarios

Using data to model scenarios and gain consensus on plans is truly important given the uncertainty of the current time. In addition to gaining consensus over future plans, you must also ensure that you are leveraging data to both manage risks and ensure compliance.

Learn more about how you can plan to win with financial planning and analysis technology.

Housing Finance Conference: How Housing Analytics can improve efficiencies, maximise income and reduce financial risk

Posted on by MRI Social Housing

The National Housing Federation’s annual Housing Finance Conference took place last month and we were there alongside Dacorum Borough Council, Hafod Housing and the National Housing Federation to present our Housing Analytics suite of solutions. The systems, designed for social housing providers, support decision-making across the whole resident journey, from pre-tenancy to post-tenancy.

Speaking on the day were:

Joanna Lewis: Senior Manager – Product, MRI Software

Greg Andrews: Client Success Manager, MRI Software

Sandra Mogan: Rent and Income Team Leader, Dacorum Borough Council

Lisa Slade: Tenancy Sustainability Leader, Hafod Housing

The Housing Analytics suite has brought together powerful solutions from MRI Software’s heritage brands to assist housing teams in making evidenced decisions to deliver support. The past 12 months has been particularly challenging; rent arrears have risen as people’s lives and livelihoods have been impacted by the pandemic. Alongside the practical implications soon expected from The Charter For Social Housing Residents, there is an immediate need for providers to have access to a broader picture of what is going on in their homes. Amidst these changes, using tools that highlight issues before they escalate, housing providers can maintain positive and support-driven relationships with residents.

Supporting sustainable tenancies

The pre-tenancy capabilities within the Housing Analytics suite offer housing teams a full picture of a potential tenant’s financial circumstances. Having this insight ensures that individuals aren’t placed in unaffordable homes, limiting hardship for residents and arrears for providers.

Hafod Housing embedded the pre-tenancy tool into their day-to-day working in order to provide support, addressing financial issues head-on and never penalising potential residents. Lisa Slade explained, “We don’t use it [the tool] to refuse tenancies, that’s the key point that we want to get across. This is purely so that we know the financial background and are able to work with residents in a positive light in order to get the outcome and sustain that tenancy for the long-term.”

Once a tenancy has begun, the in-tenancy solution maintains these positive relationships, supporting tenancy management to identify residents falling into difficulties and avoid negative outcomes. Dacorum Borough Council went live with the solution just two weeks before the first national lockdown. Sandra Mogan’s Income Management Team utilised the software to assist them with the upheaval experienced at that time. Given the limited ability to meet with residents over the past year, the email and text functions within the system enabled swift resident communication and assisted Dacorum in shifting their approach to centre on support.

During the crisis some tenants may be depressed or dealing with loneliness. That more personal contact, sending a little text saying, ‘Please contact us’, not ‘We need to talk to you about your rent account’… but ‘Give us call’, ‘Can we help you?’, ‘Can we support you?’. All-in-all it’s helped us move more towards tenancy sustainment than as a way of enforcement.

Sandra Mogan, Rent and Income Team Leader, Dacorum Borough Council

Covid-19 challenges

When the pandemic hit the UK in March 2020, few anticipated the duration of our national lockdowns or the long-term economic impact that they would have. By December 2020, the UK’s jobless rate had risen to 5.1% and forecasting further hits to employment, the Bank of England is estimating that the unemployment rate could peak this year at 7.75%.

For Sandra, the Coronavirus crisis exposed new worries for both her team and the residents they manage. “One threat is the redundancies coming after the furlough scheme ends. We have been putting in UDCs, markers on any accounts [at risk]. We have kept track of anybody in our tenancies who has been affected financially by COVID. As such, I run a report on Income Analytics and just make sure that we are keeping in touch with those people. It’s important that we don’t go down that enforcement route if they are affected by COVID or are isolating. It’s really important that we continue to keep in contact with those people, that we know that it’s not their fault they’ve been financially affected.”

Looking to the future

While the past year has been one of great upheaval, our aim remains to deliver greater innovation and support for social housing providers and local authorities – and as such, we have maintained one eye on the future. The ongoing enhancements to our suite of solutions include investigating capabilities to link repairs data alongside housing analytics in order to predict future behaviours.

Joanna Lewis elaborated on further work being undertaken to incorporate machine learning capabilities, utilising historical and live data held by housing providers.

Machine learning generally is something that we are building more and more into our products and we’re always looking for feedback for the areas where we can integrate that in. We work in partnership with all of our customers and one of the things we’ve been asked about are people who are in credit or have been really good payers and then a change happens in their lives and it leads to a change in their pattern of financial behaviour. They maybe wouldn’t be recognised immediately, but the sooner that these individuals can be identified, the more support housing teams can give them. That will be available in the product very soon.

Joanna Lewis, Senior Manager – Product, MRI Software

In the near future, machine learning will be used to bolster the work of housing teams, delivering far greater reporting capabilities and supporting efficiencies for housing officers and managers. Housing Analytics has offered long-term support to our customers and when ‘stress tested’ by the coronavirus pandemic, it was a tool that housing teams could use to strengthen the safety net they hold beneath their residents.

1 Year of COVID-19: How have Estate Agents coped?

Posted on by Trevor Youens

With March marking 1 year since the beginning of the first national lockdown across all 4 nations of Britain in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the housing market has morphed and adapted to survive 12 months (and counting) of uncertainty.

At MRI, we’ve been working with estate agents and property software providers, developing digital solutions to improve the real estate business and streamline processes. Over the past year, I’ve been eyewitness to how the market has coped, adapted, and thrived to remote working, unprecedented activity, and a huge culture shift to digital solutions to improve their real estate business and streamline processes.

Thankfully, the government recognised the essential nature of the housing market early on. While the continuation of housing sales and support in the form of the Stamp Duty holiday has gone a long way towards keeping the industry afloat, the quick response from estate agents has also been critical in making the most of a very challenging year.

A smooth shift to remote working

When the UK was plunged into lockdown, it’s safe to say that confusion was the leading emotion for many. However, estate agents across the country achieved a speedy response to the orders for high street shops to close their doors, and for the most part adapted well to working remotely.

At MRI, we’re aware that many agents are already quite far into their digital journeys, so for many, getting to a position where in-office work could be completed from home wasn’t too difficult an undertaking. Fortunately, most CRM systems are cloud based these days, so it’s been relatively straightforward to get teams up and running.

Remote viewings – the jury’s still out

In the early stages of the pandemic, remote viewings quickly became popular. While the metrics we have access to showed a sudden drop in viewings at the very start of lockdown, virtual and remote viewings brought this number back to pre-COVID levels within just a few weeks.

Customers were surprisingly comfortable with instructing agents to put houses on the market and committing to tenancies completely remotely. While this led many to champion remote viewings as a huge success, we found that while there was a huge degree of uptake in people giving verbal intent to buy during virtual viewings, this was offset by high levels of withdrawals when they saw the property in person.

In the lettings market, the levels of actual move-in throughout this process were much higher, but the bigger commitment of buying a house seems to be a step too far. While I remain sceptical about the future of remote viewings, particularly for property sales, as a result, these did undeniably keep the momentum going in the sales market, so kudos should be given on that account.

Handling continued higher demand

The government’s Stamp Duty holiday predictably led to a huge uptick in activity. Add lowered fees to the fact that many of us have had a lot of time to notice where our homes are lacking, and suddenly estate agents, solicitors, and mortgage brokers are all scrambling to keep up with greatly increased levels of demand.

Without the Stamp Duty holiday, we’d have been seeing an inordinate amount of stalled sales, and thanks to this initiative the housing market has remained fuelled and safely afloat through a truly exceptional time.

During this period, we’ve analysed property searches carried out online, and double glazing – once the most popular search criteria for tenants seeking properties – has been replaced by outside space. This shift in desirable factors is likely going to hugely affect how agents approach selling in 2021 and beyond.

Achieving compliance and efficiency through automation

We talk at MRI a lot about how agents are faced with high levels of expectations to be liable for any failures in compliance for energy efficiency, boiler servicing and other legislation.

For many, the raft of new restrictions and legislation introduced over the past year, combined with a continued downward pressure on fees, can make dealing with this a challenge, particularly in the private rental sector, and particularly with agents simultaneously having to manage their resource levels with fewer staff in the office.

With a perfect storm of higher workloads and fewer staff, agents are rightly looking to technology to ensure that compliance standards are maintained efficiently, and we’ve been working with agents over the course of the last year to help them leverage automation and technology to this end. Whether it’s by supporting them to implement new technologies, or minimising mistakes by integrating multiple systems, there’s a huge opportunity to streamline processes and save time whilst also increasing accuracy and reducing risk.

Why the future looks bright post-COVID

Thankfully, the Stamp Duty holiday is not due to finish with a hard stop, but with a gentle phasing out. Regardless, I don’t get the impression there’ll be a lot of drop-off. Enquiries are still coming in, and agents are still busy.

With so many agents now furnished with the capability of working remotely, the question about whether many people will be returning to the office at all is ever-present. I do think there’ll be a different working environment post-COVID. Of course, there are some things that need to be done in person, but this year has proved it isn’t always necessary.

What has become clear for many agents is the true value of technology to help their teams work flexibly and remotely – and while most have done a stellar job of adapting, it’s vital that the industry keeps the momentum up and continues to streamline, automate and integrate their technology approach.

Overall, with a market transacting at the level it is right now, we seem to have survived one of the worst crises for a generation. From my vantage point at MRI, the market has been kept afloat thanks to the right support from government – and, of course, the quick, agile response of agents.

Efficient asset maintenance mobilisation

Posted on by

Efficient asset maintenance mobilisation: The benefits of an organised structure

An accurate asset register is the foundation for successful maintenance measures. But can the process be accelerated without sacrificing the quality of output?

It is no secret that how effectively an organisation mobilises the asset data across its portfolio is a powerful factor in its long-term prospects. From ensuring compliance to statutory regulations to optimising the life cycle of assets, everything is reliant on a reliable, consistent asset register.

Traditionally, this stage has proven a tough hurdle for many, due to the desire to find a balance between accuracy and efficiency. In past years, these two haven’t always sat comfortably together.

The pursuit of optimal efficiency for this crucial task can lead to critical mistakes being made: inaccurate or incomplete data, inconsistent presentation, or assets being overlooked altogether.

Conversely, a more methodical, manual approach to collecting and classifying voluminous asset data can have a substantial drain on time, resources and costs – while still not always guaranteeing completely accurate results.

Addressing the challenges

To pinpoint the major challenges that have prevented organisations from achieving both efficient and accurate asset mobilisation, the process can be broken down into three core areas:

  1. Classification
  2. Collection
  3. Scheduling

The collection stage presents some very notable challenges if it is conducted in an unstructured way. It can lead to significant inaccuracies in data, data being duplicated, or asset information being missed entirely. This can mean asset surveys will need to be conducted again to correct mistakes and plug any gaps, costing even more time and resources.

In addition, if this data is collected by multiple people, they could track or store this information in a variety of ways, meaning it takes even longer to collate into one consistent format for the next phase. Again, this can lead to bad data at the other end, causing inaccurate maintenance measures and failure to comply with necessary regulations.

These issues can be compounded further if asset information is obtained from multiple sources or legacy data.

When all collected data is then classified, a prevalent problem is the use of conflicting asset classification standards. This is particularly pertinent if the collection is conducted by a third party – they may use an unstructured methodology, while your FM team has its own distinct standards.

This conflict between standards can lead to inconsistencies in how assets are classified, again leading to bad data, which will in turn impact on the quality of your maintenance schedules. If your classifications are inaccurate or don’t follow a consistent pattern, it could easily result in required maintenance regimes not being assigned to relevant assets. This means:

  • Failure to comply with statutory asset maintenance standards, may leave organisations open to prosecution
  • Breaches of SLA agreements, again incurring penalties and hurting the relationship between FM providers and clients
  • The life cycle of assets being restricted, resulting in reduced building performance, earlier breakdowns and the need for more regular, costly repairs
  • The potential of increased downtime due to unmaintained assets failing

These are the risks of an inadequate asset mobilisation strategy. However, as highlighted earlier, taking a structured approach to avoid these issues would previously increase the time and costs associated.

This need not be the case. In today’s landscape, it is possible for FM professionals to find the right balance with the right software solution.

Making asset mobilisation efficient and accurate

Fundamentally, at the heart of efficient and accurate asset mobilisation is access to an effective CAFM / IWMS solution and having a clearly established asset classification standard from the outset of this process.

This can be Uniclass, Omniclass or a standard unique to your organisation, but ideally should be consistent across the board and determined BEFORE you begin to collect data for maximum efficiency.

By agreeing upon a classification standard and programming it into your CAFM / IWMS software, you can set a fixed framework for how you want your data to be presented, and automatically set maintenance regimes based on these classifications.

This transforms a traditionally time-consuming, long-winded process of asset mobilisation into one fluid process:

  • No matter who is collecting asset data and by whatever methodology, all data collected is converted into the classification required for your purposes
  • By assigning maintenance regimes in advance based on asset classifications, these can be automatically mobilised from a date determined by you – contract start date, building opening date or activation of asset date.

Establishing a clearly defined classification standard within your CAFM / IWMS software ensures that when data is collected, it can concurrently be classified and set up with its required maintenance regime in one fell swoop – a major boost to both efficiency and accuracy.

In addition, this approach works as effectively for legacy data as it does for freshly collected information. Any data that is not classified correctly in their former state will be clearly highlighted within the software. This allows for these discrepancies to be rectified within the system to ensure assets are maintained as required.

Tackling further barriers to swift mobilisation

Harnessing the right CAFM / IWMS solution also goes a long way in countering several other obstacles that can hamper the speed or precision of asset mobilisation.

For instance, if your organisation has distinct types of buildings for different purposes, e.g. warehouses and retail outlets, accounting for their unique maintenance needs could lead to confusion over which assets in which buildings require what levels of maintenance.

Employing a flexible solution that facilitates effective asset classification group management allows you to easily set precise groupings of maintenance requirements for each unique building or group of buildings, while preserving a united classification standard and keeping all information in one central location.

What about the issue of missing asset data? For example, if the group of buildings you are responsible for, by law require a fire alarm panel to be in each, using traditional data collection techniques, it would be easy for the absence of this asset to be missed, which could leave your organisation open to non-compliance issues if it doesn’t recognise and rectify the omission.

By including these compulsory assets within your initial asset classification rules, a capable CAFM / IWMS solution will add it to your database even if the data is missing and assign the necessary PPM regime to it.

This would introduce a complete fail-safe for your most crucial asset requirements.

Making efficient, accurate asset mobilisation possible

As you can see, today there no longer needs to be a sacrifice of either efficiency or accuracy when it comes to asset mobilisation.

By moving away from manual approaches and embracing the potential of CAFM / IWMS software, we know FM professionals can continue to create asset registers with unwavering accuracy, while saving valuable time.

Tony Green of MRI has 30 years’ experience in the FM industry, 20 years of which in CAFM / IWMS, implementing enterprise FM solutions around the world.

MRI is a global leader in CAFM / IWMS software, with Headquarters in the UK, offices in Australia, Dubai, Hong Kong and Canada, plus an international partner network. The portfolio includes MRI Evolution CAFM / IWMS, Regime Manager for automatic PPM mobilisation, MRI Evolution GO Asset Manager for remote asset collection, and Asset Classifications for the correct structuring of data.

Posted in FSI