Paradigm Housing Delivers Digital Transformation with LANSA’s Low-code Development Platform
St. Albans, UK — June 6, 2017 — LANSA today announced that its customer, Paradigm Housing, has delivered the next phase of its Digital Transformation Programme – a Customer Portal and a mobile workforce solution – using LANSA’s Low-Code Development Platform. These elements form part of a broader Digital Transformation drive towards customer self-service, efficiency improvements and costs reduction. These latest additions integrate tightly with Paradigm’s existing housing management system, also built using LANSA.
Mike Silk
Mike Silk, Head of IT at Paradigm Housing
By choosing to build in-house, using LANSA’s single-language solution, Paradigm has been able to create the specific business applications it needs at a fraction of the time and cost of using packaged applications, or of building with traditional development methods. Requiring only two developers, Paradigm IT has delivered back office, mobile and web based applications without the need to master the plethora of skills such projects would normally demand. Commenting on the choice, Mike Silk, Head of IT at Paradigm said “LANSA insulates us from changing technologies and lets us focus on business need. Being able to deliver solutions in a very short time is critical to the business. It drives efficiency changes and allows us to re-invest in more homes for more people.”
Customer Portal
The Customer Portal was built in only 20 days. Customers can review their account balances, pay their rent (the LANSA based solution is integrated with Capita’s payment system), provide feedback to Paradigm, and request property repairs. The portal makes full use of LANSAs Responsive Design capabilities, whereby whichever device the portal is accessed on, the app presents appropriately for that screen size.
Mobile Field Service – Online and Offline
The Mobile solution, built in only 15 days, delivers fully optimised job schedules to 100 mobile field service engineers – plumbers, electricians, carpenters and other trades on their mobile devices. They can log work executed, either online or offline, and report back to Paradigm’s systems. Of course it needed to integrate fully with Paradigm’s back office system and customer portal, using LANSA’s out of the box integration products. Other integrations included those with a customer text messaging system, bank account verification software, post code look-up software and the Out-of-Hours support system run by Mears.
Commenting on building the mobile solution, Silk added “I’ve tried lots of third party app dev tools for mobile and they are fine for simple apps but if you really want to build anything reasonably complex, they tend to fall apart. Very soon you have to drop out of the tool and start coding. With LANSA we could do it all with one skillset and LANSA offline is invaluable”
The Mobile solution delivers fully optimised job schedules to 100 mobile field service engineers.
The Mobile solution delivers fully optimised job schedules to 100 mobile field service engineers.
Paradigm’s core systems, comprising full property management, from building and acquisition, through property rental and managing the rental account, are completely written using LANSA. The solution includes a full 360o view of the customer allowing all correspondence with the customer to be viewed in one place.
Commenting on the overall vision for Digital Transformation at Paradigm, Silk stated “To deliver the cost savings and efficiencies promised by Digital Transformation, the solution had to be end to end – no smoke and mirrors. Relying on email communication to plug gaps between systems would significantly degrade the benefits. We needed to break down silos and streamline processes between ourselves, our customers, and our supply chain partners.”
“As for the LANSA development environment, we initially chose the product to improve developer productivity, and to provide a development environment that would allow us to easily migrate to other backend databases, should the need arise. Not only has it achieved that, but it has kept pace with new technologies, allowing us to deliver business solutions and integrate with third parties, without having to re-skill in the different technologies. This is particularly true when considering web and mobile applications.”
Remarking on Paradigm’s achievements, Martin Fincham, CEO of LANSA said, “Paradigm have maximised the value of LANSA’s potential to deliver fast and with quality, at low cost on every platform. The pressure on housing organisations is immense and I’m proud that LANSA helped them to deliver digital transformation at speed”
Paradigm is one of the UK’s leading social housing providers in the South East region of the country.
Paradigm is one of the UK’s leading social housing providers in the South East region of the country.
Paradigm Housing
About Paradigm
Paradigm is one of the UK’s leading social housing providers in the South East region of the country, managing over 14,000 homes across 33 local authorities. Headquartered in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire and employing over 450 people. Paradigm is both a charity and registered social housing provider generating a turnover of £115 million. For more information visit: www.paradigmhousing.co.uk
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