Broadland Housing has partnered with leading digital and cloud service provider, ANS to deploy a modern data platform to help them uncover and act on hidden trends in their data to make intelligent business decisions.
The housing association, which provides more than 5,000 quality homes across Norfolk and north Suffolk, deployed an Azure Data Platform using ANS’ data platform accelerator process.
Using the data platform, the organisation will be able to start making predictions which will enable them to switch from a reactive to a proactive approach to property management. As a result of this project, the organisation aims to prevent maintenance issues which will avoid problems from escalating, including things like predicting when boilers are likely to break. The platform will also offer opportunities in the future to better match tenants with suitable properties and monitor usage and behaviour patterns which will become invaluable for decision making.
Broadland were already using Power BI to generate a variety of reports based on data from SQL and Excel spreadsheets, but this process had its limitations. The Azure Data Platform is now enabling them to ingest and store all types of data in a single repository, enabling them to run big-data processing, real time analytics and machine learning to provide deeper insights and better decision making. The data platform is also enabling the organisation to improve data quality and view historical data.
Antony Hedges, Head of Digital Engagement at Broadland said, “ We are continually looking at ways to deliver improvements in our services, right across the board. The Data Platform Accelerator is now enabling us to make more intelligent business decisions like accurately predicting maintenance issues and preventing tenant arrears. Ultimately this will enable us to better support our customers as we continue to improve the services we provide.” “We had real fun on the project, which was rapidly delivered by ANS in just over 2 weeks, there have been lots of additional benefits of the arrangement we hadn’t factored in such as taking away best practice, they are helping us to find more use cases for the project beyond what we initially thought we wanted.
Andy Barrow, CTO at ANS added, “Housing Associations collect vast amounts of data, but few organisations are currently able to leverage this data to its full potential. Broadland Housing is an incredibly forward-thinking organisation and this project will enable them to gain deeper insights, which in turn will enable them to improve their overall customer experience. They have been a pleasure to work with on this exciting project and we look forward to partnering with them as they push forward on their digital journey.”
