About Checkmate
Membership
The Checkmate Club comprises registered social landlords and local authorities throughout the country. Members can submit performance data on an annual basis, enabling each club member to compare their performance with that of their peers year on year.
Checkmate provides a wide range of cost and performance indicators and has built up a database of repair performance information from 120 organisations over the last nine years. It is run by experienced frontline maintenance practitioners.
Client and contractor options
Separate questionnaires and analyses are provided each year covering the client side and the contractor side in delivering a repairs and maintenance service. The client side measures performance in delivering services to tenants, while the contractor side measures the efficiency and performance of a direct works organisation.
Checkmate members can submit separate client and/or contractor questionnaires for different regions or members of a group structure, at a small additional cost. Each represents a separate dataset in the Checkmate database, and is separately validated when the submission is completed.
Types of membership
Most members choose “open” membership, and their data is shared with all other subscribers who have selected this level; they are able to identify other subscribers and will be able to be identified by them. Those that select “anonymous” membership will have access to the same benchmarking data, but will remain anonymous and will be unable to identify the other subscribers.
On-line data-entry
The data-entry screens have tips and guidance to assist you in understanding the questions, and flag up any data that is not recognised. Partially completed data is saved, so it can be entered in stages. It can be analysed at any stage in the process to compare the data entered so far with other members on the database.
When you have completed your submission, it is checked and validated, by our experienced project manager. This process may involve clarifying anything that is unexpected or unclear. Once validation is completed, your data is included for all members to use in the analysis of their performance indicators.
Analysis and reporting
There are about 40 key performance indicators (KPIs) covering the most important data on the costs and quality of service delivery. Another 250 performance indicators (PIs) examine the costs, performance, characteristics, and policies of your organisation in more detail. These compare your scores with the median, lower and upper quartiles for all members or any subgroup of organisations you have chosen to benchmark against. Where a member’s data is from a previous year, you can choose to uplift their costs by the RPI or BMI (the RICS Building Maintenance Index).
The KPIs cover all areas required by the Housing Inspectorate and the Housing Corporation.
A traffic light system indicates green where you are in the top quartile, and highlights in red any KPIs or PIs that are in the poorest quartile.
Graphs can be displayed and printed for any of the individual KPIs or PIs showing where you rank with the other members you are benchmarking against. Those with “open” membership see the names of each organisation on the graph; anonymous members just see their membership numbers. In either case, double clicking any organisation on the graph brings up their profile, indicating their size, type of organisation, and which region they are from.
Graph any of the Performance Indicators with any filter to immediately see how you compare.
You can filter which data you want to benchmark yourself against by date, cost groups, regions and organisation types. You can also inflate costs by BMI and RPI indexes.
Annual report
An annual report is sent to all Checkmate Members commenting on trends from the benchmarking study.
