England’s largest not-for-profit provider of care and housing to older people, Anchor, is working with field service management specialist Kirona to transform health and safety management in its sheltered housing schemes.
As part of Anchor’s health and safety management operations, its 781 field-based workforce is required to carry out regular inspections on all communal areas and assets throughout each scheme. For example, hot water taps in communal kitchens and bathrooms need to be safety checked, and cold water tanks must have regular temperature tests to control the risk of Legionella growth.
The company needed a solution to replace its current paper-based processes that would enable them to create digital schedules for inspections and manage mobile operations in its schemes. Following a successful pilot with Kirona, Anchor has chosen to complete a wider-roll out of Kirona’s Job Manager scheduling software and InfoSuite analytics software to each of its schemes.
During the course of the successful pilot, Kirona’s Job Manager was used to hold the programme of inspections, generating checks on a periodic basis (daily, weekly and month) for field-based staff more efficiently, with real-time visibility of jobs available to Anchor’s managers and mobile officers ensuring that inspections are carried out on time. Kirona’s Job Manager mobile software guides staff through the full lifecycle of specific inspections, from generation, allocation to completion. Inspections drop onto officer’s devices with specific details of what should be included in the inspection and when it should be completed by.
Anchor is planning a wider roll out of Kirona’s Job Manager and InfoSuite to the rest of its schemes. Kirona will be working alongside longstanding partner Northgate Public Services for this this phase of the project.
InfoSuite will provide managerial staff with real-time actionable insights into operations in each scheme and visibility of key analytics. When an inspection has been carried out, managerial staff will be able to immediately see that the job has been completed and what the results are. InfoSuite will also provide the company with access to regular reports showing what jobs are due over a certain period and their progress. At the end of this period, management teams can immediately identify if a scheme has failed to complete particular inspections and ensure that they are carried out to prevent risk.
Neil Harvey, CTO of Kirona said: “Anchor is a proactive housing association that had a clear idea of what they wanted to achieve. We were delighted to provide a versatile solution that will transform its health and safety management operations and meet the needs of its housing schemes now and in the future.”
Howard Nankivell, Housing Operations Director at Anchor said: “Traditionally our inspection schedules and reports were all paper-based and stored locally. If an incident occurred, we would have to manually search for the relevant forms to identify the most recent safety checks, which was very time consuming.
By introducing innovative management and scheduling solutions from Kirona, we will be able to monitor scheme inspections in more detail and ensure that they are completed accurately and on time.”