Southend Council

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Southend Council

The Council contacted a software house called AMP, which was later incorporated into Fujitsu. "We provided a specification, we spent some time with the programmers and we ended up with a system that worked for us" said Elaine Clifton. That system was called ConSol. "In the 14 years since then the system's been enhanced, for example, we had a huge update for Y2K; and other users have requested modifications that are available as options. However, we find that we use ConSol now in the same way that we did originally and it is as useful today as it was back then."

The Challenge

Southend Council has 6,500 properties to maintain. The council’s Direct Services Organisation (DSO) employs more than 50 operatives and has 15 office staff. It has been successful in bidding for contracts and now provides maintenance and refurbishment services to council departments and housing associations.

Until the early 1980s, the DSO was dependent on manual paper systems. In 1984, it began to use an in-house programme that was written as an add-on to the council’s mainframe system however, that was based more around the needs of clients. It could advise on the registering of a job, the completion and final invoicing; but it provided no information on the status of jobs in progress.

One clear disadvantage was that there was no automatic way to handle a job that involved more than one trade. Sometimes one trade signed off that a job had been finished, when it had only been partly completed. Sometimes a job ticket was left open by one trade, waiting for the next trade to pick it up. This often resulted in confusion.

The Council also introduced a system for the calculation of operative bonuses, a process that had been very labour intensive. This was linked to the invoicing system. There was another system for keeping track of stores. As a result, the Council had some automation, but the three separate systems for work, bonus and stores were not linked in any way. There was, for example, no way of seeing what stores were needed for a particular job and when stores might need to be reordered in anticipation.

When Commercial Competitive Tendering became a requirement for Council contracts in the late1980s, the department realised that it needed to improve its efficiency. Elaine Clifton, Computer Technician, was a member of the team responsible for researching the options. "I was originally a bonus assessor, looking at the timesheets of operatives. This process was the first to be computerised so I was given the job of liaising with the IT Department because I knew what we needed a computer system to do. My colleagues and I looked for off the shelf packages and talked to software houses. There were solutions from a client perspective but we could not find anything that matched our need to be in control of our workload. We need to know at any one time where a job is and the reason for any delay."

The Solution

The Council contacted a software house called AMP, which was later incorporated into Fujitsu. "We provided a specification, we spent some time with the programmers and we ended up with a system that worked for us" said Elaine Clifton. That system was called ConSol. "In the 14 years since then the system’s been enhanced, for example, we had a huge update for Y2K; and other users have requested modifications that are available as options. However, we find that we use ConSol now in the same way that we did originally and it is as useful today as it was back then."

The Benefits

The biggest benefit of the system is being able to track a job from receipt to invoicing. The DSO’s main client, the Housing Department, sends a file each day, which is automatically loaded into ConSol to produce job tickets. Work orders are printed off and distributed to operatives along with any extra information about priority or the need for making an appointment with a tenant. Work is allocated each morning. Operatives write the timings and details of any variations on the tickets and hand them back when jobs are finished.

When tickets are collected at the end of each day additional information about job completion is entered into ConSol. Managers can add comments about jobs in progress. Finally, an administrator enters the schedule rates, which vary according to client, to create invoices. The Invoicing section checks these before being issued.

Members of the DSO staff know exactly the status of each trade is on a particular job. The system recognises if there are three trades working on the same job. It will then keep the job open after completion of the first and second trade responsibilities and close it after the third.

"From a work control point of view we would never like to be without it" said Elaine Clifton. "I cannot imagine anything better for progressing and monitoring. It's definitely the most efficient way of working. The system enables us to function with fewer members of staff than we used to have. As employees have left, they have not been replaced and this has helped to keep our costs down."

Another important benefit is the ability to obtain reports. When the DSO was using its mainframe system it had to ask the IT Department if it needed a new cost centre or wanted a report. With ConSol, it has the flexibility to create its own cost centre and unit codes and its own reports. "Now we can get the exact information we require, whenever we need it. Within minutes we can get information on all aspects of our work, for example, what percentage of jobs in progress are on high priority, or how much we are spending on a contract in relation to our revenue."

Within the stores system, DSO managers can see what they have and keep control of it. The stores personnel use hand held devices to scan the bar coding on products. These devices integrate with Consol so the data is linked to a specific job. Everything in the store appears in ConSol and reports on order levels can be run at any time. For each stock item, a reorder level is set and when that point is reached ConSol alerts the DSO to reorder. These levels can be amended according to changing circumstances.

"From the point of view of running our business we can see everything in ConSol. We have seen so many local authority direct labour organisations disappear. I don’t think we would have survived this long if we had not had it" observed Elaine Clifton.

The Expertise

"Competition with private contractors is intense" continued Elaine Clifton. "We are under constant pressure but with ConSol we are sharp and efficient. We have just won a major two year housing maintenance contract. We have come through a lot of changes, for example, CCT has been replaced by Best Value. The future is uncertain but as long as we know where we are and what we are doing then we can survive. ConSol, is still as relevant today as it was when we bought it."