Orchard has won a large project from the Thirteen Group, the north-east of England’s largest housing group, to deliver an integrated property and customer system (iPaCs) to support the group’s drive towards improving efficiency and managing costs.
The Thirteen Group was formed following a merger of Fabrick Housing Group and the Vela Group in April 2014 to form a 32,000-property group comprising Erimus Housing, Housing Hartlepool, Tees Valley Housing and Tristar Homes, alongside its specialist arm Thirteen Care and Support.
Orchard’s solution will provide a fully-integrated system across Thirteen, yet enabling its partner companies to retain their autonomy while gaining the benefits of a shared and collaborative platform.
One of the key drivers in the project is consolidating many disparate and legacy systems (pre-dating the merger) from across the group into one fully-integrated system. This project also incorporates the implementation of Orchard’s own asset management and workforce scheduling systems, both of which came from Orchard’s acquisition of In4Systems in 2013.
Ann-Marie Lenagh, head of ICT, Thirteen Group, said, “There are major benefits that the Thirteen Group will gain from the delivery of the iPaCs project. The adoption of an integrated system plays a major part in the overall IT harmonisation plans for the group and will enable us to simplify and accelerate deployment of our services.”
Thirteen’s iPaCs project is scheduled to go live later this year.
