About Eastlight
Eastlight Community Homes, a resident-led housing association in the East of England, manages 14,500 homes across social rent, affordable rent, and shared ownership. Committed to reinvesting every pound into enhancing homes, funding new developments, and improving services, Eastlight initially sought an ITSM solution for their Technology team. However, they ultimately adopted a more comprehensive Enterprise Service Management platform that has transformed multiple areas of their business. Implemented in July 2023, Eastlight Homes now spans 7 teams and continues to grow.
Before this transformation, Eastlight faced a critical challenge: a lack of functionality in their previous system was causing inefficiencies and limiting visibility and collaboration across the organisation.
Losing Visibility of Data from a Lack of Functionality
Eastlight Community Homes needed a solution for their IT team that could support all aspects of day-to-day processes not only for efficiency but for visibility across multiple areas of the organisation such as HR, Facilities and Finance. They needed a refresh from their previous system, SysAid, which was no longer meeting their needs in some key areas:
- The need for an all-in-one solution: Information was being stored across different platforms, which not only involved switching between systems but caused delays in gathering information and led to pieces of data being overlooked.
- Lack of usable reporting functionality: In order to track key data points and manage KPIs, data had to be exported from SysAid into a spreadsheet to perform calculations. This was time-consuming and often led to gaps in data.
- Manual and inefficient workflows: Internal processes within teams were very manual and lacked efficiency across the organisation, such as the new starter process.
Since implementing Halo within the Technology Team, Ole Mills, who played one of the key roles in implementing the system, recognised Halo’s transformative potential. He saw how this could provide improvements within other departments who were facing similar challenges either using a system that wasn’t working as required or having no system at all.
Transforming IT operations and building out an ESM solution
The transformation of IT operations was the first step and Eastlight Homes saw immediate benefits:
- Parent-Child Ticketing: Compared to SysAid, which had a rudimentary ability to link tickets, Halo enabled easy access to child-ticket information from the parent ticket and vice versa.
- Asset Integrations: Integration with Ninja for laptop management, syncing data daily. Asset import combined with in-house reporting meant that Eastlight could now track hardware usage, identify common issues like hardware breakage, and develop policies and budgets based on real data.
- In-House Reporting: Tracking SLAs became significantly easier. With the Query Builder and AI Query Builder, staff unfamiliar with SQL could create reports at the click of a button.
- Integration with Microsoft Teams: Keeping records of chats relevant to tickets reduced the need for manual updates, eliminating human error and allowing agents to work directly from the ticket.
- Enhanced User-Friendly Portal: Enabling individuals from any department, using any device, to log issues through a streamlined and straightforward process.
Halo quickly became the central hub for Eastlight’s IT operations. But as more processes were incorporated, its potential went far beyond IT support. Soon, other teams were eager to adopt it.
This began with the Facilities Team, moving from spreadsheets into the fully integrated system. Following this, Health and Safety, who had previously been using WorkRight for incident reporting, are ready to launch in April 2025. Centralising data will enable them to provide incident-related information to the relevant parties instantly, essential for a Health & Safety team.
With more teams integrated, this has led to further improvements and enhancements across the board:
- Cross-Team Collaboration: New starter processes, which previously required multiple systems, and multiple teams outside of Halo, are now managed in one place, making the process smoother and more efficient for both agents and users.
- Knowledge Base: This has become a centralised hub not only for IT but for H&S and Facilities. With articles available for both users and agents, this not only helps users access required information and empower them to solve simple issues, but agents are also able to share information across teams. The ability to restrict access by roles has been vital in ensuring information is visible only to the correct individuals.
"Halo has significantly transformed our operations by increasing efficiency, enhancing workflow processes, and elevating user satisfaction. It has refined our internal customer journey and improved our IT service delivery. Furthermore, we are planning to implement additional functionalities regarding IT supplier management, asset management, and role profiling."
- Kelly Wyatt, ICT Service Delivery Manager
The Results
With Halo, Eastlight has achieved an integrated system that streamlines processes, enhances collaboration, and improves efficiency across multiple teams. The success has created a domino effect with more teams now eager to adopt Halo.
- Cost savings: By consolidating multiple teams under one roof, Eastlight Community Homes estimates it has saved around £50,000 in the last twelve months for the IT team alone.
Whilst Eastlight has made great strides in their first 18 months with Halo, this is just the beginning. They are currently looking to roll out Halo to additional teams with discussions already underway with their Business Improvement team, to improve the Project Management cycle process and expand Halo into a fully realised ESM solution. They are also exploring AI capabilities, including chatbot enhancements and AI-powered knowledge base searches.
By adopting a new system, Eastlight didn’t just gain a more efficient platform – it empowered their staff to take ownership of the transformation. “The last six months have been some of the best development opportunities within my career and current role as IT Services Analyst” said Ole Mills at go-live. “I have been involved in configuring and building a new service desk system called Halo and supported and trusted to help be creative across other areas of the organisation in providing Innovative solutions to help consolidate systems”.
Eastlight are looking forward to their journey ahead embedding Halo further throughout the organisation.
