Area Homes

Additional Depot Data

During a meeting with one of the operational managers at the Works Depot he described some of the difficulties that his staff, the tradespeople, were regularly encountering whilst trying to undertake their work. It was quite common for his people to visit a property to undertake a repair and find that –

No-one was home so they were unable to gain access the property.

The repair task has been inadequately or inaccurately specified so they do not have the right materials with them to fully complete the repair.

In the first situation, his people post a card through the letterbox of the property so the tenant can see that they have called. The card asks the tenant to contact the call centre. The tradespeople will also advise their supervisor of any properties that they have been unable to gain access to that day when they return to the depot. They do this by annotating the jobs sheet they were given at the beginning of the day next to the relevant property. (The jobs sheet is a list of all the jobs allocated to a particular tradesperson at the start of each day). The supervisor passes all job sheets to the admin team who update the IT system to show that the jobs on the sheet have all been closed (either because they have been completed or because it was not possible to access the property).

In the second situation, his people will typically call their supervisor on their mobile phone from the tenant’s property to explain the situation. They may be able to partially complete the repair but require further materials of some sort to finish the job. Alternatively, they may not be able to even start the repair, (it may even require a worker with a different trade to undertake the work). The supervisor makes a note of the situation, looks at their schedule, and arranges another visit.

The operational manager points out that there are inadequacies with the ways in which both of these types of situation feature in the management information at Area Homes. In the case of being unable to access a property, the job is closed, (the date of the unsuccessful attempt is used as the end-date for that job), and the tenant encouraged to contact the call centre again. When they call again, this is logged as a new job, with a new start date, even though it is really just a continuation of something that was reported previously. Inadequate or inaccurate job specifications result in additional visits to tenant properties being required. However, a job will have been recorded as completed on the date of the original visit by a tradesperson. Therefore, any such jobs will be recorded as completed before they have actually been completed and his team of tradespeople will be undertaking more visits than necessary if jobs were accurately specified. Knowing this meeting had been arranged, he asked his trades supervisors to report how many additional visits were undertaken by tradespeople during the previous two months. Their figures are shown below –

Additional repair visits undertaken

Last month

Wk 1

Wk 2

Wk 3

Wk 4

2 months ago

Wk 1

Wk 2

Wk 3

Wk 4

Trades supervisors would try to schedule these return visits quite soon after the initial visit as they recognised that the tenants may have already been waiting for a few weeks to get the repair completed. Trade supervisors report that these return visits would typically be undertaken within five days of the initial visit.

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