The Nottingham Community Housing Association (NCHA) is one of the largest locally-based housing associations in the East Midlands, employing nearly 800 staff, managing nearly 7,000 properties and housing 10,000 tenants across Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Rutland, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire.

The Housing with Care and Support department provides care and support to individuals within managed housing and also within their own homes. Support is provided from service orientated projects (Young Persons, Women’s Services, and Mental Health etc).

Breeze IT were awarded the contract to develop a Windows VB.NET application that allows support workers to deal with and record their service users' requirements from enquiry, referral, move in, needs, risks, support plan creation, Outcomes Star and ongoing monitoring.

The distributed and confidential nature of the projects dealt with requires careful consideration regarding data access. We opted for the use of a web service that can handle multiple secure data connections to a centralised SQL Server 2005 database.

Each project worker has a secure login to the application and, as long as they have an internet connection, they will always be able to connect securely to retrieve their service users information regardless of their location.

We were also asked to develop a Fleet Management System to manage all aspects of the project vehicles.

We opted for a web based VB.NET application connecting to a SQL Server 2005 database. This allows all outlying project sites to maintain their journey details, fuel records, and maintenance records as well as providing a method to invoice service users for their journeys.

Comprehensive reports also allow Housing with Care and Support management personnel to continually monitor expenditure and income of their vehicle fleet.

For FREE, NO OBLIGATION advice regarding any of your software or database requirements, call us on 0115 9877690 or e-mail us at freeadvice@breeze-it.com.