Issue - meetings

Report of Corporate Director for Growth and City Development

Councillor Hayes, Executive Member for Housing and Planning, introduced the report.

Tony Sowter, Technical Innovation Manager, presented the report and stated the following;

a.  The existing works scheduler NEC console, used to allocate jobs for customers and assign trade colleagues to jobs, is not fit for purpose and needs replacing as soon as possible with an alternative works order management solution.

b.  The NEC scheduler (console) was implemented in October 2023 as part of a wider NEC enterprise project initiated by Nottingham City Homes. The objective being to reduce the number of IT systems used to manage and deliver the Housing property service.

c.  All of the intended property services work streams have not yet been migrated to NEC scheduler due to ongoing system and user issues that have emerged since go live, meaning we are still operating the Property service across multiple IT platforms. This continues to create issues for our customer service centre, other housing staff and customers, particularly on visibility of data, clear audit trails on what actions are being taken by who and when, and difficulties with agility of resources.

d.  The NEC works scheduler is underdeveloped, not fully dynamic, its configurability does not support our operating delivery model and, at times, is unstable, resulting in having to use paper-based run sheet schedules as a business continuity fall back.

e.  The NEC scheduler lacks automation, and we are using additional staffing resource to plan customer appointments, schedule trade colleagues to jobs and move works through different stages of the repairs journey process. We are unable to retrieve reliable and accurate performance data and works orders do not consistently close down after works are completed, meaning we are not confidently able to articulate what the repairs service actual performance is like.

f.  Due to system issues, we are trying to manage the performance of a service based on 25,000 properties, and an annual works order volume of 170,000 across all workstreams, on an excel spreadsheet which is both inefficient and ineffective. The majority of these issues were not evident in the project testing phase due to us not at the time operating on the latest version of NEC to test on. We were four versions behind due to our historical approach to implementing upgrades. NEC as a company despite lots of words of assurance have not provided us as a key housing client with the speed and level of support required to address the issues identified resulting in a loss of confidence in the partnership.

g.  This combination of factors is having a significantly negative impact on the Property service we are delivering including the levels of customer perception which has dipped since we went live with the NEC scheduler. The wellbeing of the team is being affected with increased refence being made to our internal IT systems as a reason for absence due to work related stress. Our existing arrangement is not sustainable, and we need to do something at speed to enable the wider transformation  ...  view the full minutes text for item 51