Management of the maintenance process in social housing: A case study

Digital transformation of private and public entities is a process strongly encouraged by the European Commission. The social housing sector, which provides long-term housing or subsidies for vulnerable households, struggles to reach a good digitalization level and needs specific solutions that address its technical, financial, and administrative peculiarities. Indeed, the social housing sector often faces issues related to insufficient available funds that can be used for optimizing assets' maintenance operations, ensuring the safety and wellbeing of building occupants with better management of financial resources. Furthermore, it is not a widely explored area by the research community. To provide digital solutions for innovating the management of the property assets and, specifically, the maintenance activities for social housing, the paper presents a case study from the Italian social housing system. Current available processes, data, and information systems are explored to propose a solution for the visualization and management of collected data at the provincial, municipality, and building levels. The main purpose is to support decision makers for maintenance activities. Scholars and practitioners in this research field can benefit from the proposed solution to lead actions for the digital transition of the social housing sector.