Brighter Places moves to PIMSS in the Cloud to manage housing portfolio

Bristol based housing association, Brighter Places, has gone live with the PIMSS in the Cloud Asset Management System from PIMSS Data Systems to manage its portfolio of over 1,800 homes in the wider Bristol area and Swindon.

Committed to delivering ‘More Than Just a Roof’, Brighter Places is part of the PlaceShaper network of more than 100 community focused housing associations together owning and managing 850,000 homes. The organisation is also a member of the Tenant Participation Advisory Service (TPAS), England’s leading tenant engagement experts.

PIMSS in the Cloud has been implemented to deliver to Brighter Places a single view of all its housing stock liabilities and to enable informed decision making regarding planned investments.

The main driver for the implementation was to have a central system for hosting a sample stock condition survey that was commissioned in May 2018. The new system will allow for robust data interrogation and provide an accurate and statistically reliable assessment of Brighter Places’ future repair liabilities and improvement costs over the next 35 years. Moving forward, the organisation’s surveying team will utilise the Agility for PIMSS mobile application to further validate stock condition data.

A key consideration in the decision to implement PIMSS in the Cloud was that it offered Brighter Places a specialist Asset Management Solution, but as a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering, therefore avoiding significant upfront capital investment. The Cloud based solution provides all of the functionality of the PIMSS Asset Management system via an annual subscription, and deployment was rapid in order to meet a tight deadline.

In addition to the hosting and updating of stock condition data, Brighter Places utilises the integrated PIMSS Planning Module to devise planned programmes of work, which allows smoothing of costs in order to match available budgets.

Dave Bull, operations director at Brighter Places, comments: “Even though we are a relatively small housing association our responsibilities are no less important than larger organisations. We still have regulations and compliance to manage and we are 100% committed to supporting the communities that we look after. PIMSS in the Cloud offered us the opportunity at the right price to rapidly implement a sophisticated Asset Management System that allows us to report on key survey findings, and provides us with insight and understanding of the condition of our assets.”

Martin McDonnell, managing director at PIMSS Data Systems, comments: “The launch of PIMSS in the Cloud was a big step for us as a company but one that we were confident of taking as we knew there was a demand for such a product. Brighter Places is a perfect example of this and in PIMSS in the Cloud, Brighter Places has a powerful Asset Management System at the fraction of the cost of a server-based solution that will play a major role in the organisation delivering ‘More Than Just a Roof’.”