Customers

The Scottish Housing
Best Value Network

Background

The Scottish Housing Best Value Network (SHBVN) is a consortium of local authority and housing association landlords who work together to assess, review and continuously improve both their performance and service delivery by means of benchmarking, peer review, good practice exchange and information sharing.

SHBVN provide 3 key services to their members:

Benchmarking

Data collection, analysis and reporting.

Practice Exchange Forums

Regular meetings of practitioners to look behind the data to learn from each other.

Peer Review & Self Assessment

An assessment tool to provide a qualitative review of services and support to achieve and embed improvement activities.

Following a competitive evaluation SHBVN commissioned Exception to create and support a new platform for its benchmarking services, which are offered to its members - currently Scotland’s Local Authorities and around 40 Housing Associations. These benchmarking services are provided as part of a network for communicating ideas, experience, knowledge, best practices and performance information between SHBVN’s members, and are considered to be a critical tool in helping organisations achieve continuous improvement in the delivery of their services to citizens.

Having considered SHBVN’s requirements in detail, a web based solution was created to:

  • allow the organisation to streamline and improve communications with its members
  • further promote SHBVN’s collaborative ethos by encouraging cross sector information sharing
  • reduce time, cost and risk associated with manual overheads by automating processes
  • meet the compliance requirements for current accessibility guidelines and Freedom of Information
  • reduce support costs and provide timely updates by enabling SHBVN to control and support the application

Timescales were also critical to SHBVN with only 3 months to specify, design and develop the solution, Exception delivered the system on time and within budget.

The solution was created using Microsoft® Sharepoint® and Microsoft®.NET software. This was complemented by the application being hosted providing a secure managed environment with high availability.

“We were extremely pleased with the service and software quality delivered by Exception. Our members have gained great benefit from the flexibility and functionality of the system. I really felt Exception went the extra mile to ensure I got what we needed for our business.”