A2 dominion identify £750K of extra income per year
Housing
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Results & ROI
- Additional income amounting to £750,000 per year through reduction in leasehold arrears, shared ownership arrears and ground rent arrears
- Making the process less labour intensive enabled the cost of temporary staff to be reduced by £50,000 for the year
The client
A2Dominion is a leading housing provider with over 34,000 homes across London and southern England. They were keen to introduce Lean Thinking to simplify and streamline processes and systems and leave less room for errors that could impact residents and staff. After successful Lean pilots with Ad Esse, they embarked on an organisation-wide Lean transformation programme.
The challenge
A2Dominion identified a need to reduce the impact of errors on residents and staff, to empower staff to solve problems rapidly for better customer services and to improve value for money. With this in mind, following the organisation-wide diagnostic, the Leasehold Service Department was selected to be amongst the first wave of departments for service review and roll out of Lean Foundation. Leasehold Services comprises an Income Recovery team, Leasehold Property Management team and a Service Charge team responsible for producing service charge bills and answering customer queries. These are key functions in any housing association; Leasehold Valuation Tribunals award millions a year in favour of leaseholders when housing associations have got things wrong.
The approach
Some diagnostic activity, such as Day In the Life Of observations, data analysis and staff interviews, had already been completed across Leasehold Services as part of the organisation-wide diagnostic. This high-level analysis made it possible to design their service review around separate workshops for each team. The workshops focussed on mapping the current state processes in detail and then immediately designing new future state processes. Key findings from the current state analysis found:
- The teams were unable to answer customer enquiries within agreed service standards
- Inefficient and resource intensive processes reliant on temporary staff
- Errors in coding causing delays in producing bills and preventing full recovery of costs
- High levels of failure demand and negative impact on reputation due to poor access to accurate information
The benefits
Additional to the significant cashable benefits the Leasehold Service Department also improved customer service levels.
- Within a year the percentage of customers receiving late responses to service charge queries went from 99% to 0%, with 100% answered within customer agreed timescales
- Within a year the team achieved a 50% increase in number of service charge actuals produced
- Over 90% of leaseholder enquiries were responded to in the same week it was received
- Complaints due to a ‘failure to communicate’ fell by 54%
“Implementing a Lean programme enabled the departmental management team and staff to see that we could get the attention and resources to resolve a number of long standing challenges. By doing this the staff group was able to see immediate and medium term benefits and this was a huge factor in gaining and keeping their support for the process.”
Paul Slade | Leasehold Team Manager