New measures at Vale of Aylesbury Housing Trust
Housing
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Results & ROI
- General jobs appointed at first point of contact up from 68% to 74% within 6 months
- Gas jobs appointed at first point of contact up from 54% to 65% within 6 months
- Right-first-time completions up from 85% to 88% within 6 months
- Increase in rechargeable repairs up from 15% to 27% within 6 months
The client
Vale of Aylesbury Housing Trust (VAHT) is a registered social landlord providing housing for around 17,000 people in Aylesbury and surrounding villages. It has had a continuous improvement initiative ‘Be the Difference’ for some time. Following an organisation-wide diagnosis a repairs review was selected as a priority.
The challenge
Although performing well against targets and benchmarks with improvement work already done. However, VAHT realised an end-to-end review would yield further benefit, the key being sustainable and continuous improvement. Objectives were to increase the % of jobs settled at first point of contact, improve right-first-time (RFT) completion, and realign key indicators across the service. VAHT were very keen to embed continuous improvement and avoid a performance plateau.
The approach
Following scoping with the project sponsor and key stakeholders, diagnostic work was carried out. This revealed that less than 70% of jobs were actually booked by the Contact Centre at first call for a variety of reasons. RFT % was being measured in three different ways leading to confusion, but whichever figure was used, RFT completion was somewhere between 80 and 93%.
The redesigned process enabled operatives to complete everything ‘additional’ on tablets once at the property e.g. book new jobs, follow-on visits, ordering materials. Changes to Contact Centre processes eliminated hand-offs to Co-ordinators, and created greater availability of appointments. Revisions of definitions e.g.’emergency’, etc. means that fewer call need to be attended out-of-hours but can completed in the normal working day.
The benefits
The project team identified 28 measures for success and a realistic plan for improvement to create a sustainable end-to-end process. They now have consistent monitoring and visual management in the form of an Information Centre to track progress and problem-solving new issues as they arise.
“Following the success of the voids review we applied similar Lean principles to review our repairs process. The people carrying out the review included front –line staff from across the Trust who identified areas where we could streamline our end-to-end process. We are already seeing improvements in the way we work and a reduction in duplication of tasks.”
Dean Gill | Director of Property