After 20 years of partnership, Arches Housing and MIS-AMS continue to innovative, with the housing provider updating its housing management system to support remote and mobile working.
The updates include the introduction of ActiveH Mobile CRM, Mobile Inspector, Mobile Surveyor and Mobile Tasking modules from MIS-AMS, integrated with its existing ActiveH housing management system. All of the MIS-AMS products work from a single database, giving end-users a single version of the truth and a 360-degree view of all tenants, assets and stakeholders.
Seamus Harkins, data services manager, Arches Housing, said, “Arches has used ActiveH for ten years, including the CRM, rents, repairs and maintenance, resident communications SMS and automated tasking modules. Before that, we used ActiveH’s predecessor.
“Over this period, we’ve benefited hugely from these products. They’ve helped us optimise many manual processes, while remaining low cost and retaining a lean staffing structure – we manage 1,200 properties with a team of only 30 people in total.
“Having a single source of data has produced so many benefits, from enhancing our tenant communications and services we deliver to them to improving our reporting and decision-making capabilities. We recently decided to implement flexible remote working so that our team can work productively from anywhere, without compromising our data integrity, so naturally we looked into the mobile options that MIS-AMS provides.”
The new mobile modules have enabled Arches to successfully facilitate home and remote working across the organisation, including its office-based staff and maintenance and repairs contractors. All data relating to tenants, assets and stakeholders can be updated on the go from any location so that the data is always updated in real time. This was particularly useful at the start of the first lockdown because it allowed all of the housing provider’s staff to work efficiently from home immediately without having to completely rethink any technical or data-handling processes.
Harkins said, “MIS-AMS are great. They really understand us and feel like an extension of our team. While we’re tiny in terms of size, and probably budget, compared with many of their other customers, we never feel unimportant or disregarded, and MIS-AMS have always been able to help us find solutions when our ambitions have run ahead of our modest size!
“From a personal point of view, I’ve loved working with ActiveH. With a bit of understanding and a little bit of wider technical knowledge, ActiveH is flexible enough to allow you to tweak its functionality quickly and relatively easily. As someone who looks after IT, that’s great because a lot of the time we can quickly make changes ourselves that can make a huge difference to our end-users and customers.”
