Three Data ‘P’s That Drive Better Repair & Maintenance Outcomes
Data, in its own right, is just data. Unless it’s properly organised and analysed it can confuse rather than inform. To become useful it needs purpose, process and perspective.
A large-scale social housing partnership has the capacity to generate vast amounts of data. The data can be about asset condition, upgrades, repair operations, customer contact, materials, operative activity, you name it.
All of which could provide valuable insights to help deliver service improvements, enhanced value and upgrading of the housing stock. But the scale of the data management task can mean that the intelligence remains undiscovered and unused. The three Ps of purpose, process and perspective aim to extract the right data, and put it in the right hands, in the right format to improve decision making.
Data Purpose
Purpose is all about why we want to collect data and what we want to do with it. This must link back to quantifiable business aims such as reduced void times, improved operator utilisation, reducing missed appointments or achieving 100% safety compliance.
For social housing landlords, it’s essential to use condition data as the basis for effective planning and execution of responsive repairs and property upgrades. Repair data can be used to drill down into recurring issues and address the root causes to provide better long-term solutions.
With a clear sight of the goals and the aspects of the service that need to improve, there’s a purpose behind the data collection and analysis.
Process
Having identified the data that matters, it’s time to think about the process of how it will be used. This can be largely a question of designing feedback loops that analyse data, implement changes and track the results. The tools that support these loops are critically important.
Osborne has an in-house digital transformation team that aligns systems and data analysis with each customer’s objectives. Our ‘In Touch’ suite is based on a standard Microsoft platform and makes use of ‘out of the box’ applications so that we can exploit new technologies and interface easily with our customers’ systems.
Perspective
Perspective involves making intelligent use of relevant real time data. Individual people and job functions have different data needs. If the operational goals are clear, you have a basis for deciding which data people need to see and how information needs to be presented to support meaningful performance tracking and decision making.
Social landlords with thousands of properties to look after can easily become overwhelmed by the volume of data. The three Ps help to clear the fog, establish a definitive picture of asset condition and point the way to priority actions over the short, medium and long-term.
