Clarion Housing Association is the UK’s largest housing association, serving more than 360,000 residents in more than 125,000 properties across the UK.
Following the merger from which Clarion Housing Association was formed in 2016, the teams across the association were working with a variety of disparate legacy systems, many of which remained unintegrated. There was a clear opportunity to improve integration, efficiency, and collaboration through the introduction of a new, integrated business application platform.
Choosing a platform for operations: Microsoft Dynamics 365
Catrin Jones, Group Director of Corporate Service at Clarion Housing Association, says, “We wanted to bring everything together onto a single platform and have something that was futureproof, that would allow us to scale and to meet the different expectations of our customers into the future.”
The sector was underserved by technology solutions, but the association realised that the Microsoft Dynamics 365 application platform would deliver the business tools and integrated platform the organisation needed. It chose to implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Supply Chain together with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Service on Microsoft Azure and with Microsoft Power BI reporting capabilities.
Serving residents better
Steve Whelan, Business Solution Centre Director at Clarion Housing Association, explains that the support the association received directly from Microsoft helped the team to understand the Microsoft Dynamics solutions and really maximise the delivery of real benefits to customers and to the business.
Linda Howard, Head of Data Governance at Clarion Housing Association agrees. “We’ve now got one single version of the truth,” she says, “Clearly, the major benefit is making sure our customers are serviced and have their enquiries answered by our contact centres.”
In addition, Linda Howard says the Microsoft Dynamics deployment “helps us as an organisation to have better insight into how we work, and it will obviously improve our decision making as we go forward.”
A game-changer in social housing
Although the journey from the plethora of disjointed legacy applications to the single, integrated business platform the association is benefitting from today has been a challenging one, the association’s leadership team are excited about the foundations for future success and innovation that have now been built.
Ian Woosey, Chief Information Officer at Clarion Housing Association, states, “The Clarion technology stack we have built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a game-changer for Clarion. It’s the most advanced solution in social housing and it will enable us to improve what we offer to our 360,000 residents.”
“We’ve now got one single version of the truth. Clearly, the major benefit is making sure our customers are serviced and have their enquiries answered by our contact centres.”
Linda Howard, Head of Data Governance, Clarion Housing Association
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