Housing Associations Benefit from Enhanced Control With Numara Track-It!
Numara Software, Inc., a leader in service desk management solutions, announced today that public sector housing group, AmicusHorizon, who provide homes and services to over 28,000 residents and communities across London and the South East, and Spectrum Housing Group, who own and manage over 16,000
Reading, UK (February 01, 2009) –
Numara Software, Inc., a leader in service desk management solutions, announced today that public sector housing group, AmicusHorizon, who provide homes and services to over 28,000 residents and communities across London and the South East, and Spectrum Housing Group, who own and manage over 16,000 homes, as well as maintain a further 30,000 properties across the South and South West of England, are cost effectively managing their IT assets and delivering superior end user support because they have installed Numara Track-It!
Regaining control while managing their resources is a major driver for housing associations, especially as many of them are made up of a number of disparate groups, either through recent mergers or because they are the umbrella organisation for a number of housing landlords and housing related subsidiaries. Both AmicusHorizon and Spectrum Housing Group have experienced major change in recent years and they both wanted a help desk that would prove easy to use and manage, and could provide the necessary management information against which they can measure their performance. In addition, because both organisations were going through major restructuring, they needed a system that could not only be relied upon today, but one that would grow and be easily upgradeable as their requirements evolved.
When AmicusHorizon wanted to replace an ageing in-house system that was deemed no longer suitable or maintainable, it turned to Numara Track-It! The solution was implemented within two days and went live straight away. By using Numara Track-It!, AmicusHorizon has been able to successfully manage over 2,500 calls a month and the organisation holds details of all its servers, laptops and PCs on its Configuration Management Database. In essence, Numara Track-It! has more than met the housing association’s expectations and it is using Help Desk, Inventory, Solutions, Self Service and the Reporting functions. Even the training department are taking advantage of the Training module to log all their details on it. According to Suzanne Adams, ICT Service Manager, AmicusHorizon:
“Numara Track-It! has more than matched our expectations. We wanted a solution that we knew was going to be easy to use and manage. Numara Track-It! does everything it says on the tin. The product is adaptable for our needs, which includes logging, monitoring and defining all our calls.”
Since installing Numara Track-It!, AmicusHorizon has been able to get a better understanding of the performance of its help desk operation, tracking calls on a monthly basis for all of its 22 business units. Today out of 27,000 calls, AmicusHorizon can see that it has a First Time Fix (calls closed within an hour) of 71 percent.
Spectrum Housing Group is the result of a merger in 2007 between Signpost and Spinnaker Housing. The newly formed group comprises seven different businesses and the housing group realised that it needed to upgrade its systems to handle not only the increased volume of calls but also the growing complexity of its IT environment.
Spectrum Housing was already using Numara Track-It! within two of the merged housing associations and had been pleased with the overall performance of the product. It therefore decided to upgrade to Numara Track-It! 8.5 Enterprise Edition to deliver the additional functionality it was looking for.
In particular it wanted to be able to better manage its assets across the whole new group, be in a position to carry out on-demand audits, provide one single database to all Group IT users and finally proactively manage all of its software licences to ensure that the organisation remains compliant. Andrew Wade, IT Support Technician for Spectrum Housing, explains why the upgrade was deemed to be an advantage to the organisation:
“One of the key factors in justifying the costs of the upgrade was what the Software Licence module could bring to the organisation. This would help us meet our legal obligations as well as reduce excessive spending and over-licensing and this benefit alone could see Numara Track-It! paying for itself.”
Numara Software has found that organisations such as Spectrum Housing and AmicusHorizon faced challenges that are fairly common to Housing Associations. What they need is an easy to use, efficient asset tracking system, a single centralised help desk solution with the ability to pull all the information needed into a single application. With such disparate fragmented environments, maintaining control of the service environment as well as all the organisation’s IT assets can be a formidable task but is easily achieved in a cost effective way with Numara Track-It!
Company Contact:
Paula Elliott
C8 Consulting Ltd for Numara Software
+44 (0) 118 9001132
paula@c8consulting.co.uk
Numara and the Numara logo are trademarks of Numara Software, Inc. Track-It! is a registered trademark of Numara Software, Inc.
Source: Numara