Watson achieves 150% ROI with MRI Software solutions

Overview

• Immediate time savings across multiple functionalities, for example, supplier payment runs take minutes as opposed to 6 hours per week.
• Cut the process of sending debt letters down by 96%.
• Ease of navigation delivering 5% efficiency gains across all users.
• Estimated 50% total time savings delivered by MRI Qube PM and MRI Engage across the accounts team will be key in creating space in the balance sheet required for expansion plans.

Leeds based Watson Property Management takes pride in being relentlessly innovative and one of Northern England’s leading independent block management companies, currently providing services to over 9,000 leaseholders.

In 2023 Watson made a significant investment in MRI Qube Property Management and the MRI Engage Resident Portal, transitioning away from an outdated legacy system that had limited functionality and hindered their operational efficiency.

Since going live with MRI Software’s solutions, Watson has seen several major benefits delivered to its business in the form of significant time efficiencies and improved service quality which is vital to a fast-growing business.

We knew that MRI Software was going to be better, but we didn’t know just how much better it was going to be! Simple tasks like leaseholder demands now take minutes not hours!

– Andrew Ingram, Finance Director.

Accounting automations

MRI Software’s automation capabilities within MRI Qube Property Management have driven key efficiencies for Watson, streamlining operations considerably across accounts receivable, service charges and credit control.

Previously the process of sending debt letters could take in excess of 2 hours each month and now has been cut down to 5 minutes. This new efficiency has also given us the chance to increase the periodicity of our debt chasing from monthly to weekly, allowing for better cashflow as a business

– Andrew.

Processes across the business have been rationalised and expedited allowing Watson’s team to allocate their resources more strategically, this is perhaps most visible with their accounts payable process.

Supplier payment runs used to take us half a day per week, with automations from MRI Software it takes minutes.

– Andrew.

Watson was previously altering direct debits and mandates manually. This was a large, annual task taking up to 2 months to complete across 9,000 units. Now, credit control teams are completely removed from this manual process as its fully automated.

Quarterly demand production is now completely automated, this was previously estimated at around a week each quarter to complete.

With these specific time saving examples, combined with other features of the MRI Qube PM solution, Watson estimates at least 50% time saving efficiencies across the Accounts team.

General Navigation

It was important that Watson’s chosen system was easy to use, making adoption across the organisation easier and ensuring maximal operational benefit as staff would proactively want to use the system.

The system is very user friendly and has been adopted by staff of varying technological literacy across our organisation. We have seen time saving benefits from navigation alone. Senior surveyors have commented how much easier interrogating expenditure data is. We believe that ease of navigation will deliver around 5% efficiency gain across all users.

Benefits to leaseholders

It was important to Watson that its new solution wouldn’t just provide benefits to employees, but that its leaseholder experience would also be improved, this is where the self-service resident portal MRI Engage comes in.

The MRI Engage portal functionality provides tenants with full access to their tenancy details, including the option to make payments, report maintenance issues and engage with other tenants as well as landlords.

We’ve already rolled out the MRI Engage solution to a number of our sites and the feedback we’ve had has been very positive. We see MRI Engage as a sellable tool to our clients and future clients.

The team at Watson has also found the functionality within MRI Engage incredibly useful when it comes to the topic of Building Safety, and the software is being used as the foundation of its resident engagement strategy. This is thanks to the ability to collect and surface all the relevant data to leaseholders that’s required for compliance.

Leveraging and increasing ROI

Looking to the future, Watson is keen to continue to leverage MRI Software’s robust suite of solutions to further optimise their operations and enhance customer experience whilst maintaining a high level of growth.

Our long-term goal is to hire more surveyors and make workloads across the business more manageable. The time savings delivered by MRI Qube PM and MRI Engage will be key to creating the space on the balance sheet needed for this expansion.

– Andrew.

Malcolm Payton, Business Development Manager at MRI Software, who worked with the team at Watson from Day 1 of the company’s journey with MRI Software reflected on the journey so far:

It’s been a fantastic experience working with the Watson team. The implementation was a great success and it’s amazing to see how they’re fully embracing their new systems.