How Asset Management Saves Money and Improves Quality

Traditionally, responsive repairs, planned maintenance and voids have been treated as separate business streams in social housing. This may be the easiest option when it comes to management, but it isn’t the most effective when it comes to use of resources or improving the longevity and quality of the housing stock.

At the most basic level, it makes sense to bring forward and align planned maintenance or upgrades to a property, so they are completed during a void period. This cuts down the number of times operatives have to visit the property and can avoid effectively carrying out the same work twice. There’s also no need to disrupt the resident after they have moved in.

Additionally, improved planning of routine maintenance and upgrades will reduce the number of responsive repairs and reduce the length of void periods, freeing resources to be deployed elsewhere.

Instead of disjointed business streams, the alternative is to adopt a Asset Management approach. This integrates repairs, voids and planned maintenance into an aligned service that makes better decisions at borough, ward and individual household levels on the effective and efficient management.

If the benefits are so clear, why isn’t the Asset Management approach adopted everywhere? One reason is that it calls for a change of thinking and more organisational effort. This needs to be reflected in smarter performance metrics that look at outcomes more than activities. How valuable is a 100% first time fix rate if a large proportion of those repairs were avoidable with better planning?

Asset Management also calls for much more detailed data on asset condition, which is an up-front investment that activity-based contracting struggles to accommodate.

But it’s worth the effort. Collaborative working with our clients means that we can adopt an asset approach and demonstrate the benefits to all stakeholders, including client and residents.

The approach has improved the quality of the housing stock, boosted resident satisfaction and released financial resources to be invested in new homes. These are the tangible benefits of Asset Management.