Unified planning accelerates reporting and data access at L&Q Housing Association

Founded in 1963, L&Q is a leading housing association in the UK and one of London's largest residential developers. With a mission to provide high-quality, affordable homes, L&Q manages over 105,000 properties across London, the North West, and the South East. As a non-profit, L&Q collaborates with 90 local authorities, offering services that include property management and community investment, and supports affordable rental housing and home ownership schemes.

Business Challenges

Since 2011, L&Q has partnered with Board to streamline reporting and adapt to evolving requirements. Initially, L&Q sought an efficient way to aggregate data from its finance, housing management, maintenance, and HR systems to provide a comprehensive view of performance. 

Additionally, IT previously spent weeks gathering and organizing data from multiple spreadsheet networks, a process that was costly, time-consuming, and prone to manual errors. L&Q’s goal was to replace these legacy methods with a business intelligence platform capable of delivering real-time insights and interactive dashboards.

Ian Webster, Finance Strategy Manager at L&Q explains:

“Our two key KPI report packs are produced monthly. The Executive Group and Board Pack, which is 20 pages long, includes measures such as growth and financial health (cost per unit, operating margins etc.), customer satisfaction, sales performance and handover stats relating to new builds. Our Operational pack, which is 45 pages long, contains a huge number of KPIs including turnover, rental incomes and arrears, repair time and quality, estate quality gradings, and complaints. Both reports pull information from our finance, housing and maintenance management systems, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and other sources such as customer surveys. The manual production of these collated reports was obviously extremely time-consuming.”

Selection Process

L&Q recognized the need for a more efficient solution and evaluated the market options, including SAP BusinessObjects, Qlik, and MicroStrategy, with Gartner providing initial guidance. After detailed comparisons, L&Q invited several vendors to present solutions, assessing each on speed of data retrieval and the ability to enforce sound data governance. Ian adds:

“Some vendors suggested 18 months - 2 years in project build time because they weren’t able to combine fast execution with enterprise capabilities,” says Ian. “Board delivered a POC which showed speed of delivery and powerful functionality. The MS Office add-in also made a big impact in the selection process. Being able to provide that familiar working environment, along with the clean look and feel of the solution, showed us that we could easily train and engage our teams in using the software. We decided to go directly to the providers rather than use consultancies and that enabled us to build a relationship really quickly with the Board team, which has made a real difference to the running of the project.”

The Project

The initial project phase was completed within a few months, and L&Q’s IT team worked seamlessly with Board to ensure smooth implementation. Ian explains:

“Our IT team worked seamlessly with Board to get the project up and running very quickly. We’ve done other system implementations and therefore we understood that the relationship is key to a successful implementation. It wasn’t just the front of house people that sold the project to us, but the technical team behind the scenes.

The implementation went very smoothly, with the internal business case taking longer than the start of the deployment. The initial phase of the project took a couple of months to complete but we were able to use the software straight away and start thinking about our rollout plan. There are now trained teams, that didn’t exist before, using Board on a day-to-day basis across the business. We focused initially on Maintenance as we spend over £150m a year keeping properties up to scratch and use a combination of in-house teams and external contractors, so monitoring and reviewing the performance to ensure we are keeping our spend in line is a key driver. However it is never a complete journey; the project has continued to grow as we use Board across more and more areas of the business.”

Business Benefits

L&Q now has 140 power users across departments and over 600 concurrent lite+ users engaging with Board. Employees appreciate the platform’s intuitive interface, making data analysis accessible and efficient.

“The monthly Executive and Operational report packs which used to take weeks to manually collate are now produced in PowerPoint using Board's Microsoft Office plug-in, which means a single click refreshes the entire dataset,” says Ian. “This is obviously a huge time-saver. We also now consolidate financials from 20 operating entities using Board, making it easy to produce financial statements and notes, and all of our stock grading is now done in Board too, fed by data from Keystone. This allows us to understand cashflow and maintenance capital costs per unit or per scheme over 30 years with ease."

With Board, L&Q has the capability to regularly review 105,000 properties, focusing on the bottom 5% for data-driven decisions on their future. The self-sufficiency to query any data has reduced IT department dependency and enhanced operational efficiency, enabling teams such as Finance, Anti-Social Behavior, and Complaints to use Board’s drag-and-drop interface for quick, interactive dashboards. Ian adds:

“We’ve also got a big focus on the building of new homes, working with contractors and other housing associations on joint ventures and sharing our finances and development experience,” continues Ian. “We currently build 2,500 new homes a year with a view to increasing this to 10,000 in the near future, and Board's interactive dashboards will be helping us measure key KPIs against these developments such as costs, completion and handover rates, and defects, in real-time.”

Ian’s advice to others is to understand where internal engagement is needed to start the adoption process before looking into the vendor selection process. In doing this, L&Q identified the needs and wants of the whole business from a department-up as well as an enterprise-wide view, ensuring a smooth implementation and software adoption across all users.