ANS bags £1.75m housing association contract

OLDHAM housing association First Choice Homes Oldham has signed a £1.75m multi-year contract with IT firm ANS.

The landlord, which manages 12,000 homes in the borough of Oldham, has appointed Manchester-based ANS to design, install and manage its IT infrastructure.  

ANS will provide a cloud-based service and support First Choice’s online customer self-service system which enables tenants to log repair requests and check rent balances.

Stephen Repton, head of ICT at First Choice, said: “The new infrastructure will make it possible for colleagues to take frontline services to our customers and enable more agile ways of working.

“It will lay the foundations for future development of additional self-service options for our customers allowing them to access information about their homes and log requests quickly, easily and at their own convenience.”

Paul Shannon, managing director of Managed Services at ANS, said: “This is a trend we’re seeing across the board. Organisations are recognising that IT departments’ time is better spent supporting wider business objectives rather than on back-office management as technology becomes critical to the delivery of many customer facing services.”