New Charter Homes - How Digital Technology Can Enable Process Improvement to Save -£350K Per Annum

Editor's note: this transcript was generated by AI and has been lightly edited for clarity and relevance — some sections have been shortened or removed, and minor transcription errors corrected.

Full transcript

00:00:13Natalie

New Charter Homes is a not-for-profit organisation with 19,500 homes across Greater Manchester and Nottingham. We have 850 employees with a £100 million turnover. However, we have recently merged with Adaptive Housing Group, who have homes across the North West and East Midlands, making us even bigger.

00:00:36Natalie

We now go by the name of Jigsaw Homes Group Limited. We have 33,000 homes combined, approximately 1,400 employees, and an estimated turnover of £170 million — one of the largest housing associations in England.

00:02:25Natalie

Back in 2015, we were faced with three major challenges. The first being a new law meaning we were not allowed to raise our rents — for us, that meant a 15% reduction in revenue by 2019-2020. This meant we had to work smarter to find budget savings while still offering our customers a fantastic customer experience.

00:04:49Natalie

Our Service Improvement and IT team looked into what we could do to improve this — the most obvious being we needed a mobile solution.

00:05:28Natalie

First, we needed to know what our current processes were, and to capture this we needed a process mapping tool that would enable us to capture every detail of our processes, whilst also reporting on costings and inefficiencies. In 2015, Triaster became our first technology enabler.

00:05:56Natalie

By using Triaster, we improved our processes and made better use of our resources. It gave us one central library for all of our process maps, policies, and procedures. We have audit and version control functions, and it allows our people from across the business to see the bigger picture — particularly important now we have two organisations merged.

00:06:23Natalie

One thing that was highlighted when we first started to process map is differentiating between what the process should be and how it was actually being done. Most importantly, it drives our process improvement and cost savings. With our bespoke properties file, we were able to quantify time, resources, and consumable costs, as well as reporting on RACI, risks, bottlenecks, and the applications we use.

00:06:53Natalie

What was also a huge bonus was how easy the system was to use. We had a one-day training course provided by Triaster, and we also purchased the e-learning, which helped massively.

00:07:51Natalie

We decided that mapping the entire keys-to-keys process would be the best way forward. This meant mapping all the different scenarios a customer can terminate their tenancy through, how our voids team dealt with the void property, how repairs are dealt with, all the way through to advertising the property and the new tenant signing for the keys.

00:10:19Natalie

By having all of this data readily available, we could easily cost how much a process — or a particular activity — was costing the business. We could then remove particular activities and rerun the Triaster report to see how much we could save.

00:11:45Natalie

Overall, we created 250 maps purely for the keys-to-keys process. Having them on the wall encouraged people from around the business to be curious about what we were up to, and when we explained what we had done, they were amazed at the amount of detail we were able to record.

00:12:55Natalie

We created a document called How Do I, the name of our process library. Our process owners are expected to sign a statement understanding their role, which ensures the Service Improvement team is always involved in any changes made across the organisation, and that our maps are always kept up to date.

00:30:19Natalie

Our new to-be data was imported into our bespoke properties file, and our Triaster performance risk summary report was rerun. Overall, we saved a massive £350,000 per annum by implementing First Touch forms and using Triaster to identify that saving.

00:30:40Natalie

Triaster has played a massive part in these savings, as the software allows us to easily quantify our processes.

00:35:21Natalie

Moving forward, as Jigsaw Homes Group Limited, we will be utilising Triaster to analyse all of New Charter's and Adaptive's processes to come up with more improved and streamlined processes across the organisation. We will also be launching Triaster to our customers, so maps can be used as training guides, not just for process improvement.

00:36:00Michael Cousins

Natalie, that was excellent — a great insight into practical process improvement inside a normal organisation. One of the reasons you've been so successful is that you adopted the process approach: instead of implementing system after system, the first thing you did was a foundational element of analysing processes, working out your as-is, and adopting the process approach fully.

00:36:49Michael Cousins

And the second observation is that even with all the technology in the world, we're still dealing with people when we're dealing with process improvement — those difficult meetings never go away, because we're dealing with change and emotions. It's testament to your team that you understood both the need for the foundational process approach and the need to take care of the people in the business.

00:37:29Michael Cousins

My name's Mike Cousins. We've been around since 1994, and we think of ourselves as the process improvement company — a pure-play process company. Everything we do day to day is either helping clients map their processes or helping clients improve their processes.

00:38:47Michael Cousins

A single, central, one-stop version of the truth was a very important objective for New Charter — a one-stop shop to find out what a process is, how it works, and who's responsible for it.

00:44:11Michael Cousins

We encourage a culture of improvement being an everyday activity and business as usual, rather than a one-off exercise — we're very much advocates of enabling business improvement to happen right across the business as part of a cultural change.