Achieving Operational Excellence and Scaling Efficiently
Ocasa Homes have optimised operations and improved tenant experiences by mapping processes and leveraging analytics in Liberty Spark
The challenge
Ocasa Homes aims to provide communities with a variety of rental homes, offering tenants freedom and flexibility. Their portfolio of nearly 3,000 properties spans the Midlands, North, and South-East of England, with services ranging from space planning and market analysis to refurbishment, lettings management and maintenance.
Founded in 2018 and rapidly expanding to 80 staff, Ocasa needed to document processes to centralise crucial information. They initially used Visio but found it outdated and difficult to keep up to date, lacking essential features like audit logs. It was impractical for their growing needs.
Scaling effectively while always optimising tenant experience
It was essential to map processes to ensure their growing team was working effectively and consistently and to enable them to scale up to handle increasing onboarding of new tenants and properties. Ocasa turned to Liberty Spark, our process improvement solution, to map processes, enable training and to identify and resolve practical improvements.
“Liberty Spark allows us to plan for growth. By tracking how long each process takes, when onboarding new properties or managing more units, we can predict the time investment and determine whether we need more staff. This helps with budgeting, staffing and overall business planning. The analytical approach we can take using Spark helps us to stay efficient and to scale intelligently.”
Emma Telka
Head of Operations, Ocasa Homes
The solution
The team are focused on accreditations like ISO and B Corp, which require thorough documentation of processes. The same documents are also needed as evidence of compliance with social housing regulations. As the team continues to grow, it’s vital to document and standardise processes. This ensures everyone is on the same page and helps them to meet accreditation requirements.
This also impacts tenants and investors, who benefit from the assurance of an organised system. Tenants are already benefitting from dealing with a consistent and organised housing association, even before the full process mapping project is completed.
A major project involving Spark is the creation of a training academy for Ocasa. This academy centralises training videos, how-to guides and other resources, making them easily accessible to all staff.
By using the Roles tool, they can accurately identify the training needs for each person and select the appropriate materials. This centralised approach significantly streamlines and accelerates the onboarding and training process.
Quantify, the analytics module of Liberty Spark, is used by Ocasa to break down the work involved in a process, quantifying the time, effort and resources required.
It has proved useful in building business cases, allowing precise estimates of the time and cost associated with tasks. It can estimate how long it would take for a person to complete a task and the associated costs. This quantitative approach provides a clear picture of the resource investment needed, enabling informed decisions about potential solutions.
Having successfully used Quantify on several selected processes, the team plan to extend its use on workflows across the entire process library, including repairs or maintenance, to maximise efficiencies and improvements.
Ocasa has optimised operational efficiency, with teams now well-versed in established processes and policies. The efficiency is clear in areas like handling complaints, where having clear processes and policies (like compensation policies and SLAs) helps to streamline procedures.
Automation is a key part of this effort, significantly enhancing the tenant journey. Currently, opportunities to automate parts of a process in the lettings team, highlighted using Spark, are saving about 262 hours a week, equivalent to the workload of one full-time employee.
By mapping out processes clearly in Spark, Ocasa can ensure consistency and efficiency across all departments for their tenants. Examples include:
Check-out process: A process that touches almost every department in the business; when an issue arose, the team were able to use Spark to identify the problem quickly. In this case, a spreadsheet had been introduced, which wasn’t part of the official process. As everything was mapped and visible in Spark, it was quick and easy to spot the issue and address it, ensuring the process worked as intended. The check-out process became smooth and consistent again for the tenants.
Help desk and repairs: Ocasa’s help desk and maintenance processes are mapped in Spark, including three priority levels for different issues or repairs. When a tenant reports a problem, the team can immediately prioritise and respond with the right urgency. By having clear priorities mapped, tenants can trust that their issues are handled promptly, based on the severity of the problem.
Complaint handling: The complaints process is mapped in Spark, following the Property Redress System (PRS), a regulated complaints framework. For tenants, it enables transparent communication, giving them confidence that there’s a clear process for handling their concerns fairly and efficiently. The system also enables Ocasa to track and address complaints effectively, driving tenant satisfaction.
“When the organisation runs like an ‘efficient machine’, it reduces delays, miscommunication and errors. Liberty Spark allows us to ensure that tenant’s experience smoother interactions at every touchpoint, improved service quality and the ability to enjoy additional perks or schemes, without confusion.”
Emma Telka, Head of Operations, Ocasa Homes
“This process mapping tool is at the heart of Ocasa’s operations, keeping everything running smoothly and helping us become more efficient as we grow. Liberty Spark is user-friendly and adaptable, catering to different learning styles – whether someone prefers visual content or text lists. This means that all our information is accessible and understandable to all, with an evolving and user-centric workflow that benefits everyone, from new hires to seasoned employees. And the support we’ve had from the Spark team has been exceptional.”
Astarday Lockett
Business Process Coordinator, Ocasa Homes
The result
Operational efficiency: In the organisation’s infancy, processes and activities are set up for optimum success
Identify opportunities: Improvement and automation opportunities are spotted, making resource savings – in one instance saving 262 hours per week
Improved oversight: Easier for processes to be reviewed and signed off by stakeholders and directors, who can see processes at a strategic level
Consistency and standardisation: Everyone follows the same procedures, mapped in the same way, enabling efficiency and avoiding confusion
Feedback and improvement: Stakeholders can provide valuable feedback to redefine processes to better meet operational goals and address any gaps or inefficiencies that arise
Roles and responsibilities:It’s easier to track who is responsible for different parts of the process and ensure effective distribution of tasks, understand workloads and organise training
Processes align with operational goals: Crucially ensures that each process supports the overall mission and objectives.
Operational excellence continues to drive growth and great tenant experience
The knock-on effect of using Liberty Spark to map out all business processes is that tenants experience faster, more reliable service. There’s less room for errors or delays as issues are caught early and everyone follows the same agreed-upon process, with any changes or deviations easily and quickly spotted and addressed.
Once the Ocasa team has finished mapping all processes and ensured that they are functioning smoothly, the focus will be on scaling up and attracting more investors. Liberty Spark will continue to play a key role in showcasing the effectiveness of the current processes and operations to potential investors.
Impact
Resource savings
& efficiency gains
Process consistency
resulting in better tenant experience
Strategic oversight
improving growth planning
Turn process mapping into an engine for value creation
Here’s how you can empower teams to rapidly document and continuously improve how your business runs – at scale.
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