Chartered Institute of Housing

Client
The Chartered Institute of Housing is a charity committed to improving the quality of state and private housing in the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong. It runs hundreds of courses and conferences, offering unmatched educational opportunities to thousands of professionals each year. The Institute has offices in England, Wales and Scotland, and runs a total of four Novell networks.

Problem
The Chartered Institute of Housing's existing software for administration of Courses and Conferences was coming to the end of its useful life. In addition to being slow and difficult to use it was no longer being maintained by the original supplier, and its facilities lagged far behind the Institute's increasingly complex needs.

Solution
Tailor Made Software wrote a sophisticated yet very easy to use Microsoft Access application that fulfils all the computing requirements of the Training and Conference sections throughout the UK.
The program covers all aspects of the section, including: budgeting new courses, defining courses and workshops, booking delegates, invoicing their organisations, receiving payments, sending out statements, and producing summary nominal outputs for interfacing with their Nominal Ledger. The new program incorporates the following improvements over the old system:

  Improved program usability reduces staff errors and training requirements.

 Excellent quality reports improve accessibility of information.

 More timely and smarter invoices and statements improve the Institute's standing.

  More flexible and powerful query facilities allow phone enquiries to be answered more quickly - usually immediately.

  Newly designed program truly fits the Institute's current needs, so old business practices can be dropped, and new more efficient ways adopted.

Result
Installing the system has reduced in the delay in responding to customer enquiries from weeks, to hours. Combined with the Tender's improved quality this has substantially improved sales.