National Affordable Housing Consortium (NAHC) is a non-for-profit business that operates as facilitator/co-ordinator in the National Rental Affordability Scheme (NRAS).  NAHC provides its
services throughout Australia and offers its services to investors who are looking to invest in property market under the NRAS.  NAHC manages the process for the investor in order to ensure that they are compliant under the NRAS and as a result acquires significant incentive from the government.

High-level Integration required customised software developed using Microsoft Technologies

NAHC needs to capture and maintain data regarding the status of reserved allocations for the NRAS allocations. The process starts off at the time of application of NRAS allocations and finishes ate the delivery of ‘ready to let’ accommodation units.

NAHC was maintaining all the data in different spreadsheet (usually one for each project) making data extraction a cumbersome and time-consuming manual task. In addition all the data from marketers, property developers, builders, investors, solicitors, financial institutions and Government needed to be maintained.

As the maintenance and tracking of information was a manual process, the company faced risk of higher inefficiency due to duplication and oversight errors. As a result NAHC was seeking a solution that would:

• Integrate their 150+ spreadsheets and provide staff with a searchable centralised and automated database.
• Provide company management with analytics for accurate forecasting of allocation delivery and tenanting.
• Pre-plan the human and other resource requirements when there is an increase in workload.

The Solution

Empower IT Solutions was engaged to develop a system using Microsoft technologies and databases that would meet their business requirements.  Empower IT worked with NAHC to understand business rules and identify key parameters for the new software based on Microsoft technologies.

Based on the company’s business goals, Empower IT developed the “Housing Project Tracking & Compliance Software” based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SharePoint technologies. This new software integrated all of NAHC’s spreadsheets into one centralised and searchable database. Additionally, the Empower IT team built a couple of workflows to automate the different manual tasks.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM & SharePoint reduce the cost of project delivery

Once, NAHC team started working with the “Housing Project Tracking & Compliance Software”; the company saw a reduction in the duplication errors and data entry discrepancies. Managing the lead times and escalating tasks to managers now became quite simple.

The detailed analytics offered by Microsoft Dynamics CRM helped the management team at NAHC and Government stakeholders to make accurate forecasts of allocation delivery and tenanting. Accurate financial forecasting was yet another advantage of using Microsoft Dynamics CRM as the base of their software.

With SharePoint as one of the technologies on which the “Housing Project Tracking & Compliance Software” was built; NAHC was able to effectively manage the project related information. Managing delivery failures, and project resource approvals were a lot quicker and simpler.  The organisation was also able to reduce workloads and increase productivity with current staffing as greater numbers of houses came on stream.

Overall, NAHC was able to measurably reduce the cost of project delivery and pre-plan the required resources with reference to the workloads and this solution helped them make precise decisions.

If you too are involved in offering affordable housing and/or would like to know more about the Housing Project Tracking and Compliance Software, call us on 1300 797 888 to speak to one of our Microsoft certified professionals.