Predictive Maintenance – The holy grail of housing stock upkeep during times of social distancing

Over the past seven weeks we’ve been spending time talking to organisations about their biggest pain points in dealing with social distancing whilst striving to continue maintaining diverse housing stock and servicing the needs of their tenants.

Although housing providers traditionally administer their services in a number of different ways, some proactive, many reactive; but all with care and a great sense of value – the biggest challenge they all currently face is very similar. The challenge of the “great unknown”.

Managing faults on an as failed basis is inescapable when the first sign of a breakdown or loss of service is a telephone call from a tenant. “My boiler has stopped working” or “There’s no hot water” is often the level of detail an organisations first responder has to work with.

We’ve seen some incredibly efficient processes developed in recent weeks to triage these calls, reassure tenants and organise for an engineer to attend site but the fact remains, the number of emergency callouts remains high due to the need to assess and diagnose the problem before being in a position to effect a repair. The chances are a return visit with parts is also highly likely.

Here at Vericon we take pride in developing solutions to real world not theoretical problems and maintaining boiler stock whilst observing social distancing presents a very real problem. Not only do organisations have a total lack of data on a boiler fault until physically attending site, they often cannot carry every conceivable spare for every type of boiler within their stock.

BCM:Connect was designed primarily to overcome the great unknown by proactively monitoring a boilers health in real time to allow service personnel to attend a property with a detailed understanding of what’s wrong, and as importantly armed with the right tools and spare parts to effect a first time fix.

Through deep machine learning integration with our client’s boilers, BCM:Connect doesn’t only let service personnel know when there’s a problem, it also recognises potential service limiting faults before they occur.

Predictive Maintenance isn’t the stuff of future technology, it’s here and very much in the wild thanks to Vericon Systems. With the current restrictions set to continue for the foreseeable future, now is the time to proactively do things differently, innovate and debunk the myth that the “old ways are the best”.

To find out more about BCM:Connect and our Predictive Maintenance Technologies, take a look at our showcase pages here