Our customers are at the heart
of everything we do.
That's what I get up for in the morning.
Our purpose is quite simple,
it's to provide good
quality, affordable homes
to people who are failed
by the housing market.
Clarion Housing Group are the UKs largest
housing association,
formed in 2016 from a merger of two other
large housing associations,
and we have 125,000 properties
and just over 360,000 residents.
As a merged business, Clarion had a number
of legacy systems, many of
which remained unintegrated.
Traditionally, the housing sector
was a little poorly
served with legacy systems
that didn't really connect to each other,
so what we wanted to do is
bring everything together
onto a single platform
and have something that was future proof,
that would allow us to scale
and meet the different
expectations of our customers
in the future,
and Microsoft provided that to us.
The Dynamics solution is fully cloud-based
and this aligns with our overall strategy
within the technology area.
So the implementation
itself was a combination
of FinOps and CE.
It was underpinned by Microsoft Azure
and the BI Power platform.
We split it into two phases.
First phase went live in April 2018,
and it's fair to say
that was quite a
challenging implementation.
And the second half of the company
went live in November 2019,
by which time we'd learned all the lessons
from the first phase
and that was a much, much
better implementation.
Clearly the major benefit is making sure
that our customers are serviced
or have their inquiries
answered immediately
by our contact centers,
that we've got one single
version of the truth
as far as our solution is concerned,
helps us as an organization
to have better insight
into how we work
and obviously we'll
improve our decision-making
as we go forward.
Microsoft Unified Support
really helped us to
understand the product,
understand its capability,
and really helped us to
maximize our delivery
of real customer and business benefits.
So it's still relatively
early days for the solution,
but what I would absolutely say is that
the support from Microsoft,
through the Premier Support
has been superb
and we really are building the foundations
that we're going to need within the team
to work in true partnership
manner into the future.
There's been multiple benefits
for implementing Dynamics 365
into Clarion Housing Association.
Nobody had done it on the scale
of this implementation.
This is the biggest in Europe,
so a lot of things we were finding
we were the first people to do it.
It's the most advanced
solution in social housing,
and it will enable us
to improve the service
that we offer to our 360,000 residents.
The journey was a challenge
but we succeeded with help from Microsoft.