Changeworks recently won BE-ST Fest 24’s Technology Impact Award for our collaboration with Loreburn Housing Association.
The award recognises the most impactful technology-based solution to the challenge of decarbonising the built environment.
What was the challenge?
Loreburn Housing Association was already committed to meeting net zero targets and ensuring warmer, more affordable homes for their tenants. They had made progress in assessing their housing stock and had carried out a number of retrofit pilot projects. However, like many housing associations, Loreburn has a diverse housing stock profile, which complicates any retrofit strategy. The geographic spread of their portfolio poses an additional challenge.
What did the project involve?
Initially, Changeworks helped create an archetype-based approach to coincide with the building database information that Loreburn had already obtained. However, during the process, the team offered to create an innovative Power BI map to significantly enhance effective project management and decision-making.
Through the interactive map, Loreburn staff can see the geographical distribution of archetypes across their business areas and other key constraints. Changeworks ensured that the map is both easy to use and highly useful. Not only are properties visually categorised via archetype, but users can filter properties by their constraints, and check property data. This ensures that the developed solutions are applicable.
The video shows some of the filtering options that can be applied to housing stock
As Briony Beattie, Sustainability Project Officer for Loreburn Housing Association explains:
“This mapping tool has helped Loreburn immensely in being able to communicate our retrofit aspirations across teams for overviews of property types, and geographical locations of archetype concentrations, to further the discussions around resourcing our future projects.”
What was the outcome?
The Power BI tool enabled Loreburn to develop a clear understanding of their housing stock and archetypes. The map and dashboard will help shape and refine their retrofit strategy, improving both its efficiency and effectiveness.
The tailored retrofit tool should simplify and accelerate decarbonisation in line with Scottish Government net zero and carbon reduction targets. It also achieved cost savings in retrofit implementation through a scalable, free-to-adopt methodology, which can also be used by the retrofit supply chain.
Briony explains:
“We have shared this tool with our partnered retrofit works contractor to assist them in planning for upcoming projects and mobilisations of works, particularly in schemes within close proximity to set up optimal compound positions to facilitate works across numerous projects.”
Overall, the project underscores the importance of prioritising collaboration through long-term, impactful partnerships. In particular, it demonstrates how sharing and utilising existing, accessible data, can move us a step beyond the current pace and scale of securing warm, low carbon homes for tenants.
“Changeworks has played a pivotal role in shaping Loreburn’s archetype-based retrofit strategy, enabling us to better understand and plan for the long-term requirements of our decarbonisation projects. Their expertise has been instrumental in bringing our net-zero strategy ambitions to fruition and we are looking forward to working with the team in future phases of the project.”
