Dear Residents,

The last 12 months have seen so many significant changes happen globally and in South Africa.  As we come to terms with the impact of the new world order we need to ensure that our Estate remains at the forefront of technology and management needs. 

As a management team we highlighted the need to review our position to ensure that the systems and controls in place were adequate to deal with some of the changes we are seeing happening.  These include but are not limited to, the impact of communicable disease, the work-from-home trend, Airbnb, Uber, project & contractor management and POPIA.

Individually these are manageable but the sum of the individual parts increases the complexity significantly.
Through our investigation into possible solutions the need for an end to end system became clear.  This would allow us to digitise our office administration and link back office elements to gate control.

This migration process is not trivial and we would like to thank all residents who have pro-actively taken the time to get enrolled and ensure that their staff and dependants are correctly captured in the system.

We have a 24 month plan to continually update our internal processes and procedures and we are in the first phase of many to come.  In 2021 you will see a number of new additions to our resident app and communications as well as the introduction of many online interaction portals for your convenience.  We ask for patience while we work through the impact of all these updates and changes.  As a management team we too have lessons to learn but we have implemented a system that affords us significant flexibility and fast turnaround on changes.

To date we have the following stats:

• 3 960 residents and staff have enrolled on the new system

• A maximum throughput in the enrolment hall of 240 people in a day (we built capacity for more than 350 enrolments per day)

• Projected 30 000 transactions through the new Wave scanners this week.

Unenrolled members

Unfortunately we still have a number of properties and residents that have not enrolled in the new system.  The impact of this is significant and will result in congestion at the gate should we complete the hard cut over to the new system on Monday as planned.

The stats are as follows:

• Of the 947 properties on the Estate (additional properties have been created to facilitate HOA staff enrolment)

  • 763 have at least one person enrolled

  • 184 have no-one enrolled on the new system

• Of the expected 5 681 people that needed to be migrated from the previous system

  • 3 960 have successfully enrolled

  • 1 721 have not enrolled their templates in the new system

To encourage residents to come through and enrol the management team have

• Made more than 500 direct to person phone calls

• Send out more than 7 000 SMS reminding members

• Send more than 4 000 e-mails

• Made posts on Facebook, Instagram and reminders on the available Whatsapp chats

Delayed deployment

We have been in contact with the owners of the existing access control and visitor management system and they have kindly delayed the decommissioning of the system by 7 days to allow us to finalise the enrolment of the last outstanding residents.

We implore all residents who have not enrolled to do so this weekend as we will start the process of migration of the access control on Monday.  Residents not enrolled WILL create delays at the gate.

Conclusion

We would like to thank all residents who have taken the time to enrol.  We are encouraged by the feedback as to the simplicity of the process and the speed of enrolment.

We are excited to start the rollout plan of the new Estate Management backend over the next 3 months and to expose some of the new features and functionality to our members.

There will be teething issues during the month of February and we ask for patience while we addresses them quickly.  We are committed to the process of continuous improvements and have every confidence that over the next few months that we will better our position at the entrances and make the Estate safer for all who reside here.