Whiddon is an award-winning not-for-profit organisation aged care provider with more than 3,000 customers and in excess of 2,700 employees. Whiddon has been serving communities and enriching the lives of older Australians, supporting them with their care needs, for the past 75 years in rural, regional and remote parts of NSW and south-east Queensland. Whiddon is primarily a residential aged care provider with 20+ locations; they also provide community care and operate 12 retirement villages across their property portfolio.
Whiddon has been a valued customer of Urbanise for the past year. Recently we spoke to Regan Stathers, Executive General Manager, Technology & Property, for Whiddon, on their reasons for choosing Urbanise as a tech partner, the challenges they were looking to solve and how they are tracking one year on.
We're proud to have Whiddon as a client; they are forward-thinkers, innovators, and most importantly, they genuinely care about the aged care sector, their residents, and bettering the lives of older Australians.
What challenges were you trying to solve that led you to Urbanise?
We have been investigating property management systems for some time and have looked at several different products, but we hadn’t found one that met our requirements.
In 2020, the NSW government made several reforms to the Retirement Villages laws in New South Wales, introducing more transparency surrounding exit fees and funding arrangements and the introduction of legislated Asset Management Planning for NSW retirement villages.
At Whiddon, we base our operations on open transparency; we want everyone to see how we do things and welcome the changes. We looked at this new legislation with this mindset of being open and transparent. We decided this was our opportunity to implement an integrated system that would ensure our business stayed on top of the legislative changes and provide business efficiencies.
As part of the reforms, village operators were required to have in place and maintain a 10-year asset management plan that provided detailed costs associated with maintaining and replacing items of capital, how often costs are incurred, their expected lifespan, and who pays for them. Plans also needed to be accessible to current and prospective residents and formally reviewed by independent auditors.
These obligations were something our Excel-based asset management system would not be able to manage. We knew that the only way to go was complete digitisation of our systems to meet legislative requirements and gain operational efficiencies. In our retirement villages, we don’t employ maintenance officers, we have a 100% outsourced maintenance model, and therefore, we needed a system that would track the accountability and performance of our suppliers and provide a mechanism that would enable the sharing of requests between ourselves and our suppliers.
With more than 25 geographical locations, including 12 retirement villages – with overall sizes ranging from 4 to 60 units, and 20 aged care homes ranging from a 10-bed service to one of Australia’s largest with more than 500 beds. We needed a scalable and cloud-based software product for on-the-go access. We were looking for a local tech partner who would be following legislative changes and providing an output that met these statutory reforms.
Our secondary driver for digitalisation was to disrupt our asset management approach positively, supporting our Residential Aged Care services and associated Maintenance Officers with an integrated whole-of-business platform. Additionally, numerous other reforms are expected, such as increased care minutes requirements for care staff; we had to look into ways to streamline our operations, part of which was an efficient system that enabled a lean Corporate property team of four to deliver on our Property Strategy across our asset portfolio.
We also needed increased visibility into our operations to enable effective and efficient data-supported decisions. Further, this visibility was needed to extend into contract arrangements and SLAs, overcoming previous challenges with managing or improving contracts. We needed more visibility on the priorities that would maximise our investments, optimising the type of work we attended; instead of working on the things that screamed the loudest. With increased visibility, we can look at better ways to structure what our internal versus external teams do.
In addition, in the residential aged care environment, there is a compliance component to ensure that everything is well maintained and purposeful environments to provide for residents' well-being. The drive to digitise was also to maintain good corporate governance, which incorporates risk management and long-term business sustainability. Urbanise gave us a vehicle to look where our risks are and ensured our organisation was attending to those risks.
How did you manage your properties and their assets before implementing Urbanise?
Our operation model for our retirement villages is such that a sole operator manages all our villages and handles all maintenance and property management. At the same time, Whiddon takes on the capital costs. Residents pay for property maintenance as part of their resident budget. For our residential aged care sites, our property team of four looks after our 20 locations, supported by local maintenance team members.
We had annual forecasted budgets of anticipated capital expenditure, which would increase yearly to meet CPI and the cost of maintaining ageing equipment. Still, we needed asset registers to inform us meaningfully, and our systems between property and finance needed to be integrated to remove administrative burdens for each stakeholder. It's important to recognise the differing needs of each stakeholder group in respect of our property assets and the organisational resources allocated to acquire, build, and maintain them efficiently.
When implementing Urbanise, we started fresh and audited every village’s assets and used that information to populate Urbanise and generate our asset management plans. From this process, we tagged over 100,000 assets detailing the property, plant and equipment across our portfolio, allowing us to generate the asset management plan to start making more informed decisions based on the what, when, how and why for all our assets. This extended beyond an asset register to an informed consideration of preventative management plans, asset condition and lifecycle, and replacement programs over a 10-year forward lens.
With detailed asset management plans in place, we learned that we had to invest more capital to upkeep property across our portfolio. For the retirement villages under our management, resident budgets were increased. However, with the benefit of the system and data to back up the 'why', transparency increased for residents, and the conversations were easier to have with the residents who were aware that legislation changes were ultimately behind our changes.
When evaluating software solutions, what did you base your selection criteria on?
I am lucky enough to be both responsible for property and technology, which made the job easier as I had a clear understanding of business needs from both perspectives.
We knew we wanted a SaaS-based solution to align with our technological enterprise architecture, providing collaboration so our teams could access information quickly from anywhere and one that would allow us to get to work on our asset management planning from the get-go. This was aligned with our Technology Strategy Roadmap that saw us shifting from managing our own on-premise infrastructure to enabling access to contemporary systems that deliver business performance through the consumption via SaaS offerings.
We also sought scalable software to work across our broad portfolio. And to gain maximum efficiency, it needed to be integrated with financial systems, our use of the Microsoft 365 platform, and our contractor compliance management platform, synchronising the compliance piece. Integration with critical pieces of software would enable a smoother workflow to manage the maintenance expenditure against the asset and, therefore, meet the obligations of the legislation.
With the ability to tag assets individually and not being limited to how our finance systems recognised assets for depreciation purposes, we could associate purchase or maintenance orders and the exact expenditure against the asset. We could also remove retired assets from our compliance registers or preventative maintenance plans, essential to update contract and SLA scopes. This allowed us to see exactly how much we were spending on assets and across specific products or asset classes, informing where we invest.
Why did you choose Urbanise over other alternatives?
We have a mindset of innovation and best practices. Everything we do has to be flexible, scalable and suitable for the rest of the industry.
We genuinely care about the industry and approached the challenge thinking, what can we do to provide a model for others? As a result, the independent auditors named Whiddon one of the top three companies that excelled in developing asset management plans to meet the new legislation in NSW.
As our primary driver was legislatively driven, we knew that global asset management platforms would be challenged to meet the local knowledge of NSW Retirement Village reforms to provide a statutory-compliant system. We needed a local player that was considerate of the aged care needs and understood the intricacies involved, and the penalties for not meeting legislative requirements are far-reaching. We needed a system that would be flexible to meet these needs and ensure we could monitor maintenance costs for each asset, ensuring that any spending that had exceeded 90% of the asset value could be appropriately acted upon; so reporting with agile data capture were measures that required high degrees of accuracy.
Urbanise ticked all the boxes as a cloud-based SaaS, with the integration we were looking for, the compliance component, the ability to be prescriptive in descriptions to meet legislative requirements, and the analytics to report on the lifecycle of assets.
What have been some of the results you’ve experienced since implementing Urbanise?
Once Urbanise was populated with the property, plant and equipment information across our portfolio, we were able to generate the asset management plans that allowed us to look at the life cycles of each of those assets and the associated CAPEX expenditure so that we could start to make more informed decisions to ensure our investments were optimised. There was a greater focus on making the right decisions, and we let go of our ‘best efforts’ maintenance of assets.
The transparency increased for residents. Residents could see how much their budget wasn’t covering maintenance costs and how much more needed to be invested to maintain assets. Urbanise has made communication and reporting to residents much easier as they are provided full transparency.
With Urbanise, we are responsive to and compliant with the legislative reporting requirements with fairly tight timeframes; you need to have updated registers produced in very short timeframes (in some cases less than seven days), with stringent reporting and engagement mechanisms to ensure open transparency with village residents.
We also gained visibility into our contract arrangements, SLAs, and the type of work suppliers were attending to. With increased visibility, we can now look at better ways to structure what our internal versus external teams do. Supplier compliance is integrated, so ensuring compliance obligations are met now a lot more straightforward, and our contracts have up-to-date asset information included within them, which ensures we are only paying for assets that are still in existence.
We have a better picture of our property-related risks to ensure our organisation is attending to those risks with effective mitigations. And better visibility into maintenance and risk management supports our activities to meet the aged care quality standards for our service environments, leading to higher star ratings.
We are currently integrating our financial system with Urbanise to better track our Opex and Capex expenditures against individual assets. We will have complete visibility on what to invest in and how we will go about it. With a complete picture of the preventative and reactive maintenance requirements for all plant, property and equipment, it's now easier to manage risk and compliance and to develop more efficient ways to keep our portfolio in exceptional condition.
Backed by data, we can also drive engagements with the government to provide transparency regarding investments required to sustain operations of Aged Care services in rural, regional and remote communities. Visibility gives us the foresight to consider alternative sourcing for much-needed investment, supporting other grant programs for which we seek support.
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