CEJ: "We've found the confidence to build something much bigger."

Challenge
As a property administration company, we deal in intangible services rather than physical products. That can make what we deliver harder to pin down. But it doesn't excuse us from meeting clear, measurable requirements.

We handle utility statements, VAT filings, notices, and a long list of other recurring tasks on our customers' behalf. Many of them come with statutory deadlines. Missing one can mean a real loss for us or for the customer, and that can't happen.

We process more than 1,500 utility statements a year, and we can't afford to drop a single one. Before we built a forms system, we tracked deadlines and status in a spreadsheet. It worked, but managing it that way was cumbersome.

Solution
We're building a complete task management system that automatically tracks every recurring task we handle for our customers. We've used forms for years, but for the last three years, we've run a utility-statement system in IPW. Now all relevant tasks start automatically. That's given us the confidence to build something much bigger.

The core of the new forms system is what we call the engine. It pulls in every property we manage directly from our property administration system and refreshes the data automatically every hour. For each service, the engine creates a master record for the property. That record holds the details that apply to every future task tied to that service. It also generates the task itself, which appears in the employee's Task Overview on the IPW homepage. Each task appears on the date we've defined, and it stays open until it's completed.

We're rolling it out gradually. First up are annual financial closings, starting with properties on an off-calendar fiscal year, the ones that don't end on December 31. That's deliberate: smaller batches let us implement and train continuously, and work out any teething problems before the big year-end rush. 

Kernen i det nye formular-system er det, vi kalder motoren. Alle de ejendomme, vi administrerer, er integreret direkte fra vores administrationssystem og opdateres automatisk derfra hver time. Til hver ydelse oprettes et stamkort per ejendom med de oplysninger, der gælder for alle fremtidige opgaver. Ud fra stamkortet opstår der så automatisk en opgave, der dukker op i medarbejderens opgaveoverblik på forsiden af IPW. Opgaven opstår på en dato, vi selv har defineret, og den forsvinder ikke, før den er afsluttet. 

Udrulningen sker gradvist. Vi starter med årsregnskabsafslutninger, og tager først fat på ejendomme med skævt regnskabsår – altså dem der ikke slutter 31. december. Det er bevidst: de mindre portioner giver os mulighed for løbende implementering og undervisning, og så vi får taget eventuelle børnesygdomme, inden den store runde kommer ved årets afslutning.

Result
The system isn't fully rolled out yet, but the goal is clear: no task should fall through the cracks, and everyone should be able to see who owns each task and what its status is. That's what we've built toward.

Over time, we expect the system to become a core part of how our employees work day to day, but first, everyone needs to get to know it. New systems are usually a bit annoying at first. Once you've learned how it works, though, it starts to make sense. And from there, we can build and adjust a lot of it ourselves, based on what we need.