Yarado helps housing associations provide fast service: "We deliver on our promises again"

That administration at housing associations is time-consuming is no secret. Service costs that are divided equally among each household are easy to process, but still take a lot of workload. Costs that are not with all tenants, but are incurred with individual households, also add to this. Just think about replacing plumbing fixtures. Once in a while something needs to be repaired or replaced, but only incidentally. The result? Countless unscheduled administrative inputs, and an overworked department to eliminate these inputs, on top of processing existing service charges. Impossible work, if it has to be done by hand. 

Housing associations with their backs against the wall

Yarado helps housing associations process these service requests using RPA, also known as Robotic Process Automation. With this software, service requests can be fully processed within seconds, as well as the financial settlement. Yarado's customers were in fact experiencing problems when these settlements had to be made. "Settling the standard service costs was already a big job. When the individual requests increased for whatever reason, we ran into problems all over again."

"Our administrative staff was running on the gums. Sometimes they had to work overtime for weeks at a time, and we couldn't do anything about it."

Handling hundreds of homes is a chore anyway, but when the volume of requests increases for whatever reason, it creates a serious bottleneck. In the fall, for example, tenants turned the heaters back on en masse, and only then did these residents often find out that something was wrong with a heating element or boiler. Because of seasonal trends like this, the administration sometimes had to process service charges for days at a time, with dire consequences. "Our administrative staff was running on the gums. Sometimes they had to work overtime for weeks, and until we came across Yarado, there was nothing we could do about it."

Staff became overworked and had great difficulty keeping up with the payments to be processed, but attracting temporary reinforcements was also not desirable. After all, the staff that would be employed during that busy period would work half-days during the quieter weeks. Yarado could provide help who worked many hours when needed, and could be usefully deployed elsewhere when the administrative peaks were eliminated.

Yarado tackles the problem at the root and starts by ensuring data quality, and arranges for the data to come in the correct way, regardless of the number of suppliers or experts. Based on this data, an automatic estimate can be made of the advances to be paid by tenants. This minimizes post-calculations. Yarado requires one-time access to the systems, and can then retrieve the correct information, tie it to service cost components and then, via an industry-wide distribution cost key, correctly deposit these service costs with the tenant.

As another example, compensation tables for rent increases for sustainability measures are easily read by Yarado. The automation software can rank properties by size, read out energy labels and thus immediately see which tenant has to pay what amount in the case of a sustainability measure for a property. After tenants agree, these changes are implemented immediately. This means that housing corporations no longer spend days working out how profitable an investment is, but within minutes gain insight into whether a sustainability intervention is desirable, and in how much time the investment will be recouped. When that compensation table changes, you can change the calculation with the push of a button, so that you immediately see which properties were not eligible for such a sustainability intervention before, and now suddenly are.

Software robots fill the gap

Software robots work around the clock. That meant that during administrative peaks, staff no longer had to hang around the office until 12 a.m. to settle seasonal service charges; instead, a software robot picked up the bulk of the calculations while staff rested, including weekends. The software robot took charge of the settlements, immediately including a large portion of the variable costs for each individual household. Exceptions still sometimes required a human hand, but the staff now had more than enough time for that.

"Because of the pressure, applications were sometimes left for as long as three to four weeks, and costs were not charged for months later."

So within the organization they noticed serious benefits from the automation they were implementing. However, for the housing corporations themselves, the tenants always come first, and they too benefited enormously from Yarado's help: "Because of the pressure in our office, requests were sometimes delayed for three to four weeks, and costs were not calculated until months later. It is annoying for tenants to have to face the unexpected costs of a necessary service intervention months later. Now requests are immediately uploaded into our system, and that same month we can add the advance payment on top of the standard service costs."

"We are once again delivering on our promises and can offer tenants quick help," said the tangible effects of RPA. After all, housing associations are there for the tenants: "They should not be the victims of an increasingly complex housing sector. Sustainability is going to become a core goal in our society, and that brings more work. Everyone deserves to live comfortably, and livability is paramount. All the more important it is to handle that administration smoothly, because that just benefits the tenant tremendously."

"Tenants should not bear the brunt of an increasingly complex housing sector.Everyone deserves to live comfortably."

Taking into account that the pressure of sustainability in the Netherlands falls partly on the shoulders of housing corporations, intervention is needed. Solar panels, for example, can be partially reimbursed by the tenant if they are not physically integrated into the roof structure and the home can function without them. These types of requests will become increasingly common in the coming decades, and tight, proper handling of service charges is very important here. The investment is often significant, and knowing that the financial handling is flawless and fast makes a sustainability move more attractive to corporations.

How RPA addresses this problem

With Robotic Process Automation, administrative actions of an employee are mimicked on a virtual machine. This offers opportunities, because because the knowledge of the administrative staff can be put into the software one-to-one, you can process most service costs automatically within a week. Exceptional, incidental service costs can also be taken into account. If there are exceptions that occur frequently, then they can be included in the automated process, until most of the administration happens completely automatically, and without errors, too.

RPA umbrella software or programs that housing associations work with, and software or offered documents from vendors and experts. That means that service charge settlement can be picked up automatically and unattended by Yarado, regardless of the ERP system the housing association uses. The software robot can store information and input from an external system in an Excel file, and work from there, or put it straight from one program into another. "So our administrative staff is no longer sitting around with their hands in the mud, while we see that the speed of the department has increased."

In addition, it is common for these service costs to be charged from various angles. After all, a property can age on many fronts, and each task requires a different company or specialist. Yarado reads invoices and bills from various parties at customer sites, and converts them into one standardized format that can then be worked with again. In addition, RPA offers one more very big advantage that saves housing associations a gulp.

Numerous requests and cost reports make it difficult for board members to keep track of the actual costs. Yarado's software robots change this by structuring the data and, upon request, producing a report that records all the findings of a given period. A report on the desk every Monday of how much a particular building costs? Or would you rather have that report every day? Yarado makes it insightful with the goal of providing support to housing associations. Perhaps more important, however, is to help tenants quickly and effectively. Thus, Yarado uses RPA to do its part for society.