“Wider acceptance among staff”

For nearly three quarters of a century, DUWO has been building, renting and managing affordable, sustainable housing for students. And DUWO has been using Sensus BPM software for many years to describe and streamline its processes. DUWO has now switched to the new Sensus BPM Online. Risk & Quality Manager Lemja Kovac is very happy with this transition. “In the new version you can open the application much faster. This has increased people’s willingness to work with it. The threshold is now much lower. And the transition was a piece of cake.”

Well-described processes

The work of DUWO is similar to that of a housing association. “Only our tenant turnover is much higher,” says Lemja Kovac. “In housing owned by a regular housing association the tenants generally live there 11 to 12 years. At our units, Dutch students stay on average four years and foreign students sometimes only a few weeks. Because we rent out both furnished and unfurnished housing units to foreign students, we are somewhere between a housing association and a hotel in terms of business typology.”

Lemja Kovac joined DUWO three and a half years ago as a Risk & Quality Manager. Together with the process and theme owners, she ensures that the processes are well described and that there are clear agreements about who is responsible for what. This approach is even more essential given that DUWO’s 170 employees operate from four geographically widespread branches. Lemja gives a practical example. “Selling off housing is a complicated process. You need to engage an estate agent and a civil-law notary, ask permission from the authority in charge of housing associations, and possibly also look into whether there is a homeowners’ association. If someone wants to start that process, they first look at the process description to remind themselves how it works. With processes clearly and uniformly described, you don’t have to start from scratch each time.”

New possibilities

Lemja says the upgrade went very smoothly. “I made a backup of the old version and sent it to Sensus, who then prepared the processes in the new format in the new Sensus BPM Online environment. It was also explained to me in person by someone from Sensus. We went through some changes and changed a few links so that the publication worked well on our intranet. Most of it was self-evident, so within a few hours he was on his way again.”

“A large number of improvements have been added to Sensus BPM Online. For example, we can now add multiple documents to a process step, a welcome extension. What’s also nice is that we can easily adjust the layout when describing a process step, like making text bold or underlining or highlighting it. It is now also possible to link our data to processes. In the Complaints Registration process, we would then immediately have data on customer satisfaction available. I notice that they are sometimes a bit further at Sensus than we are here at DUWO. But for the time being, I am very satisfied with the features that are currently available.”