Gravesham Borough Council has chosen Castleton Technology (now part of MRI Software) to provide the core business applications for its full digital transformation by 2023.
When the council’s previous Capita housing management system was coming to the end of its life, it decided to use the opportunity for a complete refresh of its core business applications in order to deliver an innovative and transformative platform for customer insights and a high-quality digital experience.
Daniel Killian, assistant director for housing, Gravesham Borough Council, said, “Change at this scale is important to get right first time. Castleton offered us a modular and flexible housing management system that was not only easy to use but ticked the box for integration with our existing solutions.
“A traditional housing management system will always deliver a traditional service. What we’ve encountered is housing management suppliers layering improvements onto their systems and developing great-looking interfaces, yet often the underlying functional issues haven’t been fixed, which then effect the system’s flexibility and effectiveness.”
Castleton’s three-year contract with Gravesham Borough Council includes the provision of the full suite of business applications spanning housing, CRM, self-service, mobile working, asset management, service charges, dashboards and arrears forecasting, all of which will be hosted in Castleton’s own datacentre.
Killian said, “During the procurement process, Castleton set-up a number of webinars with their existing customers who gave us a no-holds barred view of the solutions and the support they get from Castleton. This was an important factor for us because we weren’t getting a sales pitch, but valuable working knowledge of the solutions in real working scenarios.”
Gravesham’s IT team wanted to ensure that any new systems were sufficiently flexible to let them maintain, configure and expand so they could completely control the direction of travel.
Killian said, “This is exactly what Castleton can provide us with. We were attracted to this level of flexibility within the solutions because our in-house IT team is agile enough to make these configurations without needing to go back to Castleton and adding extra development cost.
“We found other suppliers’ solutions to be more rigid and locked-down, which can suit some housing providers’ IT departments but for us, Castleton’s modular and flexible approach was what we were looking for.”
