Birmingham Council procures Shared Works following the Connected Places Catapult's DIATOMIC Accelerator

Birmingham Council became the first local authority client of Novoville Shared Works after a successful collaboration during the Connected Places Catapult’s DIATOMIC accelerator.

Consistent with its efforts to be a leader in digital transformation, Birmingham City Council (BCC) is working hard to transform how it manages its built environment to increase effectiveness and reduce costs. Sponsored by BCC in the winter of 2023, the DIATOMIC Accelerator, coordinated by Connected Places Catapult, selected Novoville among nine innovative companies to address critical urban challenges and improve city management processes.

Birmingham Council’s Retrofit Challenges

During the accelerator, we worked closely with Dan Gregory, Portfolio Manager in the Route to Net Zero Carbon team at BCC. Dan's insights into the administrative challenges local authorities face when delivering retrofit programs, such as LADS and ECO, were eye-opening. These challenges include poor data collection and a lack of visibility into on the ground delivery, leading to subpar customer service. On top of this, the need to administer and check over many different schemes leads to high overheads and labour-intensive coordination.

The contractor’s retrofit process today.

The Shared Works solution

We analysed how Shared Works could tackle these challenges, with the objective of enhancing the council’s ability to support publicly (and utility) funded retrofit programmes effectively. We realised three things:
- Councils, contractors and customers need access to one version of the truth at all times.
- Coordination needs to be automated as much as possible.
- Reporting needs to become more efficient.

Shared Works could deliver this for councils. We got to work building the necessary features to integrate data and stakeholders in one place, and structure the ECO customer journey digitally. This took around 4 months, during which we continued to engage with more contractors, such as Elite Energy, as well as utilities, such as EON and EDF, who fund the works.

What Shared Works offers all stakeholders.

The outcome

Following a successful demonstration and the positive feedback received, Birmingham City Council is moving forward with procuring Novoville Shared Works platform to administer its ECO program.

The accelerator also facilitated a pivotal introduction between Novoville and Dodd Group, a UK-wide contractor.

This led to Dodd Group trialling Shared Works on hundreds of properties owned by their client, Wrekin Housing Group. Daniel Camp, Head of Retrofit at Dodd Group, commented: "Our team appreciates the comprehensive approach of Shared Works - its capability to facilitate retrofit Assessment, Improvement Options Evaluation, and Medium Term Improvement Plan, alongside providing real-time reporting and reducing unnecessary communications. The one-stop-shop approach of Shared Works perfectly meets the needs of the market. Novoville’s flexibility in integrating essential features reassures us that as we expand the use of the platform, it will be thoroughly fit for purpose."

At the end of the 6-months accelerator, the potential of Shared Works was prominently displayed during Birmingham Retrofit Action Week, an event that brought together key regional stakeholders. A highlight came from the community energy group, Acocks Greener, whose representative expressed high praise for our collaborative efforts. He said the results they’d seen far surpassed their expectations, and offering warm congratulations to everyone involved he highlighted how this initiative was not only exciting but also of “tremendous strategic importance".

Our thoughts on DIATOMIC and Connected Places Catapult.

Novoville’s involvement in the DIATOMIC Accelerator and events like the Retrofit Action Week were extremely productive, and we would like to thank BCC and Dan Gregory in particular for his invaluable insights, as well as the rest of the Connected Places Catapult team. We would also like to mention the quality of the consultants brought on to provide CPD throughout the accelerator. They were of a high calibre, and we are confident we will continue to benefit from their workshops. Overall, the DIATOMIC programme contributed to positioning Novoville Shared Works as a key contributor to the West Midlands digital strategy for retrofit.

Watch this space for further updates as we continue to forge partnerships and help make our local environment more efficient and sustainable. If you’d like to know more about how Shared Works could benefit your organisation, please don’t hesitate to contact Louis at louis@novoville.com