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CASE STUDY

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Revolutionising Housing Development with SDS Tools

Great Places leverages SDS tools like ProVal and Sequel to streamline appraisals, enhance project management, and support their ambitious goal of building 11,000 homes over the next decade, backed by expert training and support. 

CATEGORY: ProVal & Sequel

NUMBER OF USERS:

30 ProVal users  |  20 Sequel users

CHALLENGE

Great Places needed to scale housing development efficiently while maintaining financial control and operational accuracy, despite limited time for system transition and a large team requiring training.

RESULT

ProVal has assisted Great Places in their development ambitions and with their knowledge of ProVal and Sequel progressing, Great Places plan to build an additional eleven thousand new homes over the next ten year period.

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The support is great, you can phone with quick and silly questions and email when it’s not as urgent or out of hours. The support team are good at layman’s terms to make it easy for us to understand issues which can be quite techy.

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THE PROCESS

From Ambition to Action

Great Places have dedicated their time to finding solutions for delivering affordable social housing and improving the lives of people living in the nineteen thousand homes they manage.

Having completed six thousand new homes across the last 10 years there was never going to be a quiet time to switch to using ProVal & Sequel but with continued ambitions to develop new homes at scale and in an effective and efficient way Great Places switched in 2014.

 

SDS’s viability workshops have provided Great Places with a wealth of knowledge, such as picking up invaluable tips on the functions of ProVal to understanding NPV and how the cashflows work together. They found that everyone attending the workshop from directors through to graduates were engaged and felt that they gained greater insight into how to use the software more efficiently.

Additionally, the training also helped to look at long term results helping maximise the feasibility of a scheme through changing tenure or unit mix in the results section. The finance department has thoroughly enjoyed using dummy schemes to gain a greater understanding of making schemes viable and resolve any issues.

THE VALUE ADDED

Empowering Teams for Rapid Proficiency

There were concerns about how long team members would take to get to grips with ProVal but all twenty eight members of Great Places Finance and Development teams are able to use SDS systems efficiently through training and support, with everyone working on ProVal and Sequel happy with the usage and implementation.

New members joining Great Places are typically proficient with ProVal and Sequel a couple of weeks into their training.

In addition to this, the annual support inspires confidence with efficient, friendly help just a phone call or email away.

PROVAL & SEQUEL

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Overall, SDS has provided Great Places with expert training and support during the implementation of ProVal and Sequel. Viable schemes can be appraised quickly amongst the team with twenty eight members within finance and development able to efficiently use the SDS software suite.

THE RESULTS

Key Benefits of ProVal and Sequel in Great Places Housing Group housing development

number 1

Additional Attribute Fields Captured

The data gets transferred across systems while reducing duplication. This allows for time to be spent focusing on other areas of their appraisals. Additionally, this allows them to have a good starting point when properties are developed which can be built on with trusted stock condition data. 

number 2

Faster Data Capturing

They were able to capture all of the information in the development process to avoid the hassle of visiting properties to capture data years later through stock condition surveys.

number 3

Time Savings

The most obvious advantage Great Places highlighted with SDS software was the time saved generating appraisals and generating programme level financial data.

Drafts of appraisals allowed time for Great Places to fine-tune their process and effectively heighten their productivity. 

number 4

Property Attributes

Property attributes are also advantageous, using them to drive data going forward. These have been useful to Great Places in the long term with data input and inaccuracies allowing for visibility meaning that nothing gets missed.

number 5

Support & Training

Additionally, the quality of support and training that has been provided allowed for all members running ProVal to appraise schemes in under five minutes.​

number 6

Financial Templates Suite

The Finance Team at Great Places have worked hard to utilise the standardised reports within Sequel and to build bespoke reporting around them. The result being a suite of financial template reports which can be produced at the click of a button from the live data within sequel.

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