Dublin City Council (DCC) is responsible for public housing and community, roads and transportation, urban planning and development, amenity and culture and environment. The council has 63 elected members and is the largest local council in Ireland with over 6,200 staff members across the authority.
DCC have a large portfolio of social housing with approx. 27,000 dwellings, which makes them the biggest landlord in the country. DCC are responsible for the repair, maintenance and updating of all their housing stock. There are 300 trade, operations and administrative staff assigned to deliver this service across 8 admin locations.
DCC operate a maintenance system which manages repair requests from council tenants. The maintenance system (OHMS) used by DCC is a robust application but lacked modern digital integrations with other enterprise applications used around the council causing a disconnect resulting in manual, time consuming workflows for business users.
Citizens reported property repair needs over the phone, which council staff then logged into the OHMS system. Once logged, these requests were processed by each of the eight depots. This is carried out by the Foreperson. The Foreperson decides who the work is allocated to. The work could be allocated to the direct labour tradespeople or to outside contractors. This is done by printing the repair requests and physically handing them to the tradespeople and contractors.
Once the foreperson passed on the printed repair requests to the respective tradespeople at the depot, these tradespeople would then proceed to the field to carry out the necessary repairs. Upon completion, each tradesperson would fill out a paper form detailing the finished jobs. Weekly, over 80 tradespeople would submit these completed forms to the foreperson in each of the eight depots. The foreperson would manually update the job completion details back into the Housing Management System (OHMS).
This legacy process was paper based and subject to human error, lengthy delays, and lack of visibility on real-time repair status. The process was ripe for digital transformation, which would allow maintenance records to be collected and reported electronically in a timely fashion, and greatly improve efficiency.
IMGS were tasked with delivering a modern, digitally focused solution to enable depot forepersons to view, analyse, and issue service requests. Tradespeople were to be enabled to view, edit and close service requests from an app, issued to them by their depot foreperson.
With this brief, using FME as the backbone of the processes, IMGS was able to create “FiXiT” a modern desktop & mobile solution which empowered users with all the functionality to monitor and manage services request.
Dublin City Council Housing Repairs Portal
We envisaged 2 workflows for the DCC (OMHS) system:
The high-level workflow comprises user processes, the workflows driving them and the supporting infrastructure.
At the highest level of requirement, the system delivers the following:
The shift from the paper based OMHS system to the dynamic digital FME Flow Apps system has made huge improvements in the day to day running of maintenance queries.
Administration:
Tradespeople:
Operational:
As with any system there is always a need for improvements and service enhancements. The following future requirements have been identified by DCC:
“We are immensely proud of the transformation achieved with the FME Flow & Flow Apps; a project brought to life through our collaboration with IMGS. This digital overhaul not only streamlines our operations but also empowers our staff with real-time data and tools, thanks to IMGS’s expertise in data intelligence. The savings in time and resources are significant –thousands of hours annually that can now be redirected to enhance our Housing Maintenance operation. This ongoing project stands as a testament to our commitment to innovative solutions for urban management within the public sector and is a milestone in our journey towards a more efficient and sustainable city council”. (Mark Geoghegan, Area Maintenance Officer, Dublin City Council).
Dublin City Council
Public Administration
