1 Commercial Services jobs

Orbit is a large housing association with c.45,000 properties across the Midlands, East Anglia and South of England. Within this portfolio are over 5,500 Independent Living properties, including sheltered housing and extra care homes for older people and 800 supported housing properties. Additionally, over 10,000 tenants within our general needs properties are over the age of 65. We are a leading housing association for the development of new properties, with ambitious targets to build an extra 20,000 new homes by 2030, including new extra care and specialist supported housing. Assistive Technology We are embracing new technology and want to develop our homes and services to enable people to live independently in the homes they love, with technology have a key role to play within this. As we build new properties, we are including the cabling and infrastructure to allow the installation of the latest technology to provide a breadth of services previously unavailable. In our latest extra care scheme, we have a full digital warden call system that has the flexibility to link in additional products including wearable tech. We know this is just the start and that the potential to deliver different types of services to not only support independence, but also help to improve or maintain health and wellbeing for our customers. Our sheltered housing properties all contain warden call schemes, which range in age up to c.40 years and are at the point for replacement. We are developing a plan to replace all of these systems and implement up to date systems that can be added into as new technologies are developed. We want to ensure that we can continue to adapt and provide the best services for our tenants and take advantage of new technologies that will help people to live happy, healthy lives and age in place. Technology plays a key role within our new Independent Living strategy. We know the benefits it will bring will help to transform our services and the lives of people using them. The next step is to ensure the best use of available funds to deliver what people need and want and deliver demonstrable outcomes from our investment, as well as developing our back office functions and using technology to improve our ways of working and service offer. We want to use the rich data that comes from assistive technology to better understand not only our customers but also our service and the systems and processes in order to deliver this. A Critical Friend With the rapid pace of change in technology, with new hardware and software coming to market constantly, there are many options that we could use. As a Housing Association, we want to make the most of the money we have, investing the income from rents to ensure that our most vulnerable customers have the very best level of service and support from us. In order to ensure the most effective use of funds, we are looking for support to help guide us through the mass of information and products available and what will deliver the best outcomes for our customers and for Orbit. With all of the potential for service delivery through technology also comes the data that is available from it. We want to use the insight from this data to help us continue to develop and provide the services that people need, and by understanding those people living in our properties better we will be able to do this more effectively. The service we need is to have a critical friend, to help us understand the potential options and challenge the assumptions we have made and the decisions we make. We have our specialist expertise in housing and providing high quality homes for vulnerable people. We know there are other organisations who have real expertise in assistive technology and how this can be delivered on a large scale to provide a transformation in services offered. Key areas we need support with are: Developing the Assistive Technology strategy Help develop the business case for investment in Assistive Technology Challenging the assumptions made How we future proof agreed solutions Ideas for different products and services Specialist knowledge of AT and the future direction of support Planning to ensure integration with existing investment regimes Budget and Timescale The budget for this support is up to £25,000 over two years. We are currently developing our strategy and are looking for the support to commence in March 2020. Submission requirements Please set out the details of: Your expertise in Assistive Technology You experience of working with Housing Associations Any previous consultancy or support work delivered in this area Your approach to delivering this work Any additional value you can deliver Submissions should be no more than 4 sides of A4 and emailed to francis.burrows@orbit.org.uk by 31 January 2020. If you would like to discuss this opportunity please contact Francis Burrows on 07966 995 556.