Ingredients:

• Specialist contractors
• Trust’s desire to deliver excellent customer services
• Ongoing tenant feedback
• Information on trends
• Partnering Risk Panel

Delivering excellent services to our tenants relies on services supplied by specialist contractors. The Trust has moved away from
standard contract monitoring arrangements towards an innovative key performance monitoring matrix. This is weighted equally on customer feedback (which is continually lifting), with just the remainder based on the more traditional monitoring of technical aspects such as
Health & Safety, speed of invoicing and contract compliance.

As this approach could expose the organisation to more ‘risks’ and needed to be managed differently, a new Partnering Risk Panel was set up made up of executives, board members (including tenants), internal auditors (Bentley Jenison) and the Trust’s finance manager, acting as a ‘critical friend’. The Panel meets quarterly to discuss performance based on feedback from the key performance matrix.

When contracts were due for renewal a group of tenants,including those who had individually complained about the previous contract, were brought together to form a focus group to suggest improvements in the new contract.

Contract monitoring groups meet every month to review the day-to-day performance of the Trust’s contractors. For example, all aspects of the service provided by the Dodd’s Group, used for the Trust’s gas servicing and maintenance, is monitored by a group of four tenant members. Things like the time taken to complete a repair, the tenant’s satisfaction with the repair, and even which member of staff carried out the repair,are all presented to the contract monitoring group to review performance. Any outstanding complaints are raised at the meeting, which enables each individual case of dissatisfaction to be looked into.

We are also gaining further efficiencies through challenging the norm in procurement and, where it makes sense, we are packaging contracts together, for example, gas servicing and boiler and central heating installation.

Results:

• Contract monitoring strongly based on customer satisfaction
• Real tenant involvement in monitoring and managing contracts
• Measuring quality rather than price
• Builds longer-term relationships by retaining good contractors - we have moved from 1-2 to 3-5 year partnering contracts, giving stability to the Trust, tenants and contractors.
• Excellent value - 300K per year saving over 5 year contracts
• Our performance on gas servicing is upper quartile.

For more information contact Tony Hewitt on 01952 217103.