Testimonial & Case Study

Interview with JOE JACKSON,
Maintenance Coordinator
Amélie Housing

About Amélie

Designated under the Special Work of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, Amélie Housing delivers affordable and secure housing for at-risk and marginalised groups across Australia. Established in 2012, Amélie Housing operates as a registered Tier 1 Community Housing Provider under the National Regulatory System for Community Housing. Initially beginning works in NSW, Amélie Housing has grown to a national organisation. Working alongside interstate partners, the organisation aims to create socially inclusive neighbourhoods by providing housing, social and material support to those in need.

Under the umbrella of Amélie Housing, it aims to utilise its services to:

Overcome the declining affordability of housing in Australia and increasing poverty and homelessness
Prioritise the investment into the development of social and affordable housing
Create housing that also combines services that support households with high and complex needs.

The Challenge

The Asset Management team within the Amélie Housing branch in South Australia is responsible for the dentification, classification and rectification of repairs and maintenance across hundreds of properties.

Utilising the information gathered, the team will prioritise repairs based on need and budget. In addition, field collection works are then analysed and forecasted in a ten-year plan for all future rectification works.

Previously, the Amélie Housing branch in South Australia would engage external contractors to inspect all the properties. From the engagement, Amélie would receive a report and the maintenance coordinator would review and collate the data to organise maintenance and create an Asset Management Plan over the next ten years.

Joe Jackson, Maintenance Coordinator at Amélie explains, “previously asset management companies would provide their services to us for a considerable fee. We found we received a lot of unnecessary information such as the square meterage of walls and so on, a lot of the information didn’t add value to budget forecasting or what we really needed to know to make our services as effective as possible”.

“We found the experience of using external asset management companies as limited, expensive and the assessments simply took longer to complete”, advised Joe.

The Solution

Joe first discovered Mobile Data Anywhere when completing asset management for the Spotless organisation. Spotless is a Downer company and the largest integrated facilities service provider across Australia and New Zealand. Servicing over 1,000 customers across government, education, healthcare and aged care, Joe was engaged to review all asset orders under the Department of Transport using Mobile Data Anywhere as the audit management tool.

Based on his experience with Mobile Data Anywhere at Spotless, when Joe and the Asset Manager at Amélie Housing were assessing how to improve service delivery in the maintenance and repairs program, Joe recommended implementing Mobile Data Anywhere.

“We identified we could bring the data collection process in-house quite easily because there was a functional and accessible system available to do so. When the Asset Manager and I looked at this role in particular, we identified we could remove the external contractors, and we could tailor the asset data collection process to identify the information that we really needed with better efficiency and at a significantly reduced cost.”

“We find the application enables us to put information into a sequential form. We can organise externals and know we’re looking at roofing, structure and retaining walls. All photos are sectioned and aligned to the report. We can understand the condition of the house better, refer to notes easily, and estimate and prioritise what work needs to be done”, commented Joe.

The Service

Mobile Data Anywhere aims to deliver a product that is user-friendly, intuitive and empowers the customer.

“From a user experience creating the forms was really easy. You can break things down into categories, add and subtract fields, and move items around. You can really do whatever you need to do. When we looked at it, we would create the forms, play around with the changes and then within a few weeks we had a fully functional system ready to go.”

“We’ve found Michael really helpful and obliging, there is always support available. Although I must admit we haven’t needed too much additional help because we found it easy to create what we needed. We may need additional help down the track when we look at editing reporting. But we haven’t changed our forms since being function ready, it’s brilliant” explained Joe.

The Outcome

A primary goal of the Amélie Housing Organisation is to “bring hope through housing” to those who are excluded or isolated from society. Through the ability to input and store data in real time the use of Mobile Data Anywhere has enabled the Amélie tenant community to have a direct voice and improved relationship with the maintenance team.

“The best part of the change to Mobile Data Anywhere is developing the relationships whilst making a plan to improve the conditions of the housing. There are some tenants who don’t speak up, and you wouldn’t be completely aware of the maintenance requirements if you used an external contractor. Now we can build relationships whilst visiting and no longer have boring, uninformative and expensive reports.”

“There can be 400 – 500 items when we download the reports from Mobile Data Anywhere, now with first-hand experience in the data collection process we know where things are despite how big the data is” concluded Joe.

Since the implementation, Amélie Housing in South Australia describes increased visibility, improved relationships with the tenants, and significantly reduced costs as the primary benefits of adopting Mobile Data Anywhere.

The Future

“The process works really well now. We get to connect with our tenants and see the issues first-hand all the while having a tool that can easily collect the required information. It’s all-encompassing really.”

“In terms of the future, we’ll be looking at editing reporting based on the collected data. We previously would receive a handful of photos from the external contractors whereas now we collect approximately 50 – 60 photos which as you could imagine tells a thousand stories” said Joe.

Mobile Data Anywhere is so low cost compared to using external contractors. There are just so many plusses involved – we can understand and document all their issues which you just wouldn’t get using a contractor. We have time to develop relationships while doing the reports – it’s just an all-encompassing, all in one” he concluded

Conclusion

“The process change using Mobile Data Anywhere has been a positive step for our business. We can effectively approach maintenance and ten-year asset plans whilst making a connection to our tenants by cutting out the external parties” ended Joe.

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