Published: Sep 16, 2022
digital transformation in the rental market
We partnered with a rental Bonds Board within a state government fair trade association that holds 635,000 rental bonds in trust valued at $741M. Each year 266,000 lodgements, 260,000 refund claims and 176,000 customer inquiries are processed.
Dialog was initially awarded the contract to redevelop the core back-office rental bonds application in 2009 and in 2013 won an additional contract to build an online interface that provided self service facilities for tenants and landlords.
Problem
The existing legacy back-office system for managing bonds was based on outdated and unsupported technology and could not be extended to provide online capabilities. The bond management processes were paper based and required extensive manual processing. The result was a highly inefficient back-office process and very poor customer service.
Solution
Dialog delivered a full application lifecycle project from requirements confirmation to deployment. The solution used the Microsoft technology stack including Windows SQL Server 2008 and multi-tier Microsoft .Net architecture. The highly secure system provides extensive back-office functionality and also provides online services that allow landlords and tenants to interact directly with the system thus removing the need for paper forms. The system also supports mobile users.
The project also included an entirely new hardware and software environment designed to sustain the application over years of operation and designed to be fully fault tolerant. Data migration involved data cleansing of client address records as well as the manipulation and migration of approximately 2 million images (scanned documents) plus over 1 million bonds and associated records from a very old version of Oracle database to the newly designed SQL database.
Dialog worked with subsidiaries Access HQ for specialised testing services and Ice Media for UI design and usability testing. Dialog also partnered with Tecala Pty Ltd to deliver hardware/software infrastructure services.
Outcome
The system has resulted in greatly improved back-office efficiencies and a vastly better end user experience for staff as well as for tenants, landlords and agents. Since its initial launch in 2010 it has been continuously improved through ongoing functional enhancements as well upgrades that ensure that the underlying technology platform is up to date.
This article was first published in Dialog