How to Tackle Asset Management Challenges and Keep Your Eye on Compliance
There’s plenty to think about at the moment if you’re responsible for managing social housing assets. There’s a new regulatory framework coming in the immediate future and significant longer term challenges such as net zero carbon.
Net zero will involve social housing providers in substantial retrofit programmes. Many will also have to decide what to do with properties that aren’t economically viable to upgrade.
Alongside these challenges many social landlords have repair and maintenance backlogs that grew during the pandemic and are hard to clear because of continuing skilled labour shortages.
Staying Compliant
Maintaining 100% safety compliance is always a priority. Is there an effective way to avoid the risk of taking your eye off the ball when there are so many significant asset management challenges to deal with?
Part of the answer is to make compliance as self-sustaining as possible. What we mean by this is establishing a regime where fully integrated safety compliance reporting happens automatically. One where it’s easy to get an instant snapshot of the status at any time and where potential issues are flagged without somebody having to manually sort through multiple data sources.
Integrated Compliance Management
Integrated compliance management needs a foundation of integrated compliance data. This helps to remove the risk and uncertainty that come from having key data spread across multiple databases and systems. Planning how to deploy financial and human resources in the most efficient way to maintain 100% compliance also becomes more straightforward.
Many large social housing providers lack the basic foundation of fully integrated safety compliance reporting. Just keeping track of the status becomes a significant task to put alongside the other asset management challenges you face.
The good news is that there’s an easy way to bring your compliance data into an integrated management system, no matter how many providers you have carrying out safety checks or how many different systems they use for recording data.
Osborne are currently in the process of creating a tool that can extract compliance data in almost any format and present it through a simple-to-interpret data dashboard. This will help social housing providers to switch the emphasis to planning and taking pre-emptive action, rather than chasing data and reacting to events. This frees up more capacity to tackle the other big asset management challenges you face.
For more information contact Alex McLean [email protected] or take a look at our resource centre.
