The project involved upgrading access infrastructures in properties of the over 100 million tenants served covered by the European housing association CECODHAS, enabling or improving access to housing services and third party service providers. Workflow was introduced to support key processes maintenance, metering, placement, general query handling or security as well as provision of third party services such as care or support. The aim was radically to improve service delivery processes and hence quality of living environments for all income and age groups.
The target market for @Work4Homes solutions is very large. The huge importance is reflected in the membership of CECODHAS. The 37 full members of CECODHAS are national and regional housing organisations from the 15 EU member states. There are associate members in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Norway, Russia, Poland, Slovakia and Switzerland. The full list is as follows: Belgium, Danmark, Germany, Spain, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, The Netherlands, Austria, Portugal, Sweden, UK, Czech Republic Estonia, Hungary Norway, Poland, Russia, Slovac Republic, Switzerland (associated), Bulgaria (candidate). Every 4th European, some 100 million people, are provided with housing by a member of CECODHAS.
The services developed in this project together make up a new way of providing housing, a “virtual” housing service enterprise. Such a virtual enterprise uses new access methods and process support tools to supply a new quality of housing service. From a user perspective, @Work4homes services provide the following:
- supplier users (mainly SMEs) such as maintenance contractors will be able to accept contracts for maintenance and report progress online through any of multiple access techniques, performing their work fully integrated with IT-supported business processes in the housing provider organisation.
- teleworking employee users of the housing provider organisation will, from home and from mobile settings, be able to access company information and to take part in business processes much as if they were in the head offices of the organisation, enabling them to perform their on-site or out-of-hours tasks that much more effectively.
tenant and owner users will be able to interact with housing providers from their living room in a very user-friendly fashion, will be able to receive advanced services such as videotelephone-based support services as well as having access to high-speed internet and digital TV , also provided by third parties.
staff carrying out collaborative projects at national and European level will as users have access to state-of-the-art collaboration tools to support their work, hosted by specialist providers working with national and European associations.
