As one of the largest housing providers in the UK, Optivo provides 44,000 affordable homes in London, the South East and the Midlands. Creating safe, sustainable communities for residents, Optivo helps residents make the most of their lives through jobs, training, financial and digital inclusion.
The challenge
Manifest has been working with Optivo for 12 months, and the latest project utilised the customisation abilities of their housing management system to reduce staff’s administration time spent getting paper requests authorised.
The solution
Manifest’s Lead Developer, Charlie Willenbrock and Gareth Rexworthy, Project Lead, worked closely with Optivo’s Service Improvement Manager, Jo Noshouri and project team.
Already using their housing management system’s standard functionality to carry out transfers and write offs on resident rent accounts, Manifest followed Optivo’s policies and created a ‘wrapper’ for these processes inside an authorisation procedure.
This workflow based solution enables staff to raise requests for transfers or write offs as well as ensuring the request is reviewed by an authorised user who can accept or reject it.
Functionality was improved to ensure staff cannot raise and authorise the same request, and there are no outstanding existing requests. Robert Stewart, Optivo’s Business Solution Manager, said
“All of the staff surveyed say Manifest’s work has saved them time, improved customer service and given them the tools to do the job.”
The results
The work has made a significant impact; speeding up rent arrears information, as well as reducing duplication and errors. It streamlines the whole process saving time.
An evaluation shows that:
- Rent accounts are now up to date within one to two days. Significantly up from two to four weeks
- Mobysoft completion rates has increased from 55% to 70%
- Administration time has reduced from 14 minutes to three to five
100% of staff surveyed say Manifest’s work has saved them time and given them the tools to do the job.
Jo Noshouri from Optivo says the benefits are clear to see: “This work has played a significant role in reducing our team’s administration time and refocusing their efforts into supporting our residents to pay their rent on time.”