Wrekin Housing Trust wins national award

The Wrekin Housing Trust has won the ‘National Award for Maintenance Innovation’ in the National Housing Maintenance Forum (NHMF) 2009 Awards.

The Trust was named overall winner for their innovative maintenance solution, ‘Hand-e-Work’ at the NHMF Maintenance Conference dinner held on January 27 in Stratford Upon Avon.

The awards were held to find and publicise best practice in maintenance that housing associations can benefit from.

Originally developed in 2005, ‘Hand-e-Work’ involves the trade workforce using mobile hand-held devices to streamline work efficiency. Hand-e-Work allows tenant repair calls to be slotted straight into trade operatives diaries, allowing appointment dates to be given to the tenants whilst they are on the telephone, and saving time between jobs allowing more repairs to be completed daily.

The operative records the start and finish of each job, which triggers the sending of the next job to the PDA, and allows the call-centre to ring the tenant within a few minutes of the repair to undertake a short satisfaction survey.

The tradesmen carry stocks of materials in the vans, and any materials used on a job are recorded using the PDA, which generates an order for replenishment stock that is sent directly to Travis Perkins (the supply chain partner). Each tradesman can elect either to collect his replenishment stock from the branch or to have it delivered to home or site on a particular day.

The Hand-e-Work and Hand-e-Biz systems are now marketed to other housing associations and local authorities.

Wayne Gethings, director of asset management at The Trust said: “We’re delighted to have won this award, and hope our maintenance solutions can help other organisations improve their internal processes and service to tenants.

“Before mobile working was introduced in the Trust, there was a raft of job tickets, timesheets and other paperwork in the office. Transferring information electronically by PDAs has significantly reduced the amount of paperwork, releasing spare capacity for office staff to focus on other more effective work, as well as enabling the capture of more accurate, useful data about jobs”.