Squared, formerly Luton Community Housing, has signed a five-year contract with Castleton Technology for a complete migration of its existing systems to a fully hosted, integrated set of solutions based around Castleton Community.
Launched last year, Castleton said that Community is designed for smaller housing providers who often struggle to find software that caters to their size and budgets. Community is a cloud-based, ‘out of the box’ system suitable for housing providers with up to 1,000 properties, comprising Castleton Housing Management with full reporting capabilities, Castleton Agile for mobile working and Castleton EDRM.
Rob Robinson, commercial and IT manager, Squared, “When looking at the total cost of all our existing standalone packages against Castleton’s offering, including the project delivery cost and time-savings we can expect to achieve, this investment makes a lot of sense.”
Squared’s implementation of Castleton Community will be run in parallel with a data-cleansing project with support from Sagacity Solutions to ensure that only up-to-date and accurate data is being migrated onto the new system.
Squared also plans to implement Castleton Financials to overhaul its back-office operations, alongside Castleton.Digital for a self-service tenant portal and Communications Manager for real-time tenant communications.
Commenting on Squared’s disparate portfolio of software from different suppliers, Paul McCalvey, head of new business, Castleton Technology, said, “We’ve come across this situation a number of times, particularly among smaller housing providers – separate systems being bought by different departmental heads over time and therefore operating in silos.
“It is often hard to walk away from these systems because of the investment and sometimes a reluctance to change. Talking to the team at Squared, there is a strong sense of commitment from all areas of the business to use better technology solutions to drive improvements, and that’s half the battle.”
