AmicusHorizon, a Registered Social Landlord with a stock of over 28,000 properties has chosen to mobilise up to 150 inspection surveyors and housing officers with mobile workforce software from 1st Touch (www.1sttouch.com). The software will be rolled out in a staged process to teams across London and South East of England. The teams involved will be: pre and post inspections, stock condition surveyors, estate management, the tenancy services department, gas and electric inspectors and the CASA Supporting People operation.
1st Touch applications can bring significant efficiencies and productivity increases to any application where field based inspectors, surveyors, housing officers and operatives provide services. 1st Touch has already won widespread acclaim in the social housing market where the software manages, supports and controls all aspects of mobile employees’ activities. The resilient but flexible system enables easy, programming-free, user-customisable PDA based solutions to be created through its easy to use graphical interface and is specifically designed to simplify handheld form design and data capture. Any type of electronic form can be generated without the need for Business Process Mapping. 1st Touch has also developed high quality integration with most of the leading housing management systems used by local authority housing organisations, RSLs, Charities and ALMOs.
1st Touch was chosen by AmicusHorizon as the company offers a wide range of modules with proven efficiency and productivity benefits; which could readily be seen in action across numerous other organisations in the social housing sector. In addition, key integrations that AmicusHorizon required had already been developed by 1st Touch; including one for AmicusHorizon’s back-office Orchard housing-management system.
It was felt that 1st Touch were the supplier most focussed on the future by monitoring the evolving market dynamics of technologies such as the Microsoft Windows Embedded Handheld systems against newer less established technologies such as Android.
According to Jeanette Alfano, Director of Technology for AmicusHorizon; “The 1st Touch range is very comprehensive and they have done such a lot of work with their customer base. They offered a wide range of tested modules ideal for giving us a push up into mobile. We were impressed too by the interface with their customers through the user group. This seemed to work very well; especially in the way 1st Touch has one eye on future developments. We will be rolling the new system out as part of a staged process and look forward to working with 1st Touch.”
For his part Robert Dent CEO of 1st Touch, welcomed Jeanette Alfano’s comments adding; “Inspection is one area where the effective use of mobile technology can deliver real benefits. The swift collection and processing of information enables AmicusHorizon to raise their already enviable service levels even further, which is great news for their tenants too. We look forward to working closely with them.”
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About 1st Touch (www.1sttouch.com)
1st Touch, based in Southampton UK, has enabled dozens of field workforce-based organisations to embrace new mobile technologies and so achieve significant savings, greater productivity and more cost-effective use of resources.
1st Touch Mobile delivers clear and unique benefits:
- Reduced costs to organisations because airtime is minimised and the system is always available – with or without airtime.
- Flexibility through simple customer control over forms creation and amendment.
- Integration to multiple back office and other enterprise software applications, so that data is entered only once.
With its widely acclaimed mobile technology, 1st Touch has a clear focus on the Social Housing and Local Government markets. Many social housing providers and local authorities, at large, now benefit from the fast and tangible, best of breed benefits that 1st Touch mobile technology delivers to the enterprise.
To date, over 50% of the social housing market, which has deployed mobile technology, has chosen to implement 1st Touch. In local government, 1st Touch has already been adopted for a wide range of mobile workforce uses. Ready to use applications for local authority organisations include: Public Buildings, Highways/Street Services, Environmental/Waste Management, Revenues and Benefits, together with Planning Control and Trading Standards.
1st Touch is a PartnerSelect Authorised ISV for Motorola and an Embedded Technology Partner with Microsoft.
For further information, please contact:
Cherry Rance
1st Touch
07850 313600
0871 716 3060
or
Leigh Richards
The RIGHT Image PR & Marketing Group
07758 372527
0844 561 7586
