Since moving to the latest version of Kirona’s Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS v5), Grand Union Housing Group has increased its scheduled jobs by 46 per cent.
Having used an earlier version of DRS since 2014 for its maintenance and repairs teams, Grand Union invited Kirona to review its use of the software following its upgrade in 2017. Kirona found inconsistencies in the housing provider’s planners’ diaries, with jobs that had been forced in or assigned to appointment slots that weren’t the most efficient option for the organisation. These instances resulted in reduced productivity, allied to inflexibility in the software creating general cautiousness from planners to trust the process.
Having identified areas for improvement based on the data analysis, Kirona ran a series of coaching sessions to re-educate Grand Union’s planners on how to effectively schedule appointments using DRS to ensure they were comfortable with the system and reduce the likelihood of forced appointments.
After the coaching sessions, Grand Union’s diaries showed significant increases and an overall improvement in planner performance. The number of scheduled visits in the planners’ diaries has increased by 46 per cent, forced entries fallen from eight per cent to around three per cent, ‘best slot’ usage has grown from 67 per cent to 94 per cent, and the number of completed jobs has risen from 62 to 90 jobs per day.
Andy Garnham, project manager, Grand Union Housing Group, said, “We found working with Kirona to be a positive experience, underpinned by their approach to a collaborative partnership. Rather than leaving us to navigate the software on our own, they have made great efforts to arrange regular checks to ensure we were using DRS to its full capacity.”
