Fire Safety
Meet the team: Get to know Andrew Beechener
Andrew Beechener talks us through his experience in the tech and social housing sector and his journey to working at FireAngel
Fire Safety
FireAngel’s team of Business Development Managers offer a wealth of knowledge and experience across a variety of sectors that ensure our solutions can be tailored towards specific projects.
In the first of our new meet the team series, Andrew Beechener, FireAngel’s Business Development Manager who covers Scotland, Ireland and the North of England, discusses his experience in the tech and social housing sectors and the opportunities the IoT can offer in challenging times.
For the last twenty years or so I’ve been working in the tech sector, specialising in home environment monitoring.
My experience includes working within the social housing sector and the health and social care sectors, understanding how capturing data from within a property can provide an indication of factors that might have an adverse effect on somebody’s health and well-being.
Things like particularly cold or damp houses can have a severely negative effect on individuals. Within housing, not only are people concerned with the health and welfare of the resident, there’s also the issue that persistent damp within a property could develop into a case of disrepair, which is very much in everybody’s minds at the current time.
One of the key characteristics of the IoT is that things need to be done at a scale. So, for me, I thought it was very interesting coming from a much smaller business that was trying to effect quite significant change within the customer organisations with which we were working to really tip that on its head and to come and work for a much larger organisation, like FireAngel who have created unique technologies including IoT solutions for the UK housing sector.
As we know social landlords are facing a mountain to climb, organisations that manage tens of thousands of properties across a hugely dispersed geographical area, often with an arm’s length relationship with the tenant. The resident has been given an enormous amount of latitude and flexibility around what they do within their own home, and rightfully so.
There’s a very interesting process around digital transformation which we are happy to talk to our customers about. This is a question of not just whether the IoT sensors measure temperature and relative humidity. It’s whether they, as an organisation, can become responsive enough to act on the information that these systems generate.
What we can hope to achieve is to create a window of opportunity in which the landlord becomes proactive and aware that there is a potential issue before that problem has become critical.
In recent news, it’s common to hear about residents who have genuine issues and often don’t get the help they need at a time where it can be rectified and hence this can lead to severe health issues for the resident and costly disrepair claims for the housing provider. If they are able to act within that window, they commit against the most serious of those potential outcomes. I think that really is where it’s this question of disseminating between data and information.
I’m a big fan of rugby, so if the Six Nations are on and you ask me that question, it will all be about watching rugby. I also have two children and a lot of my time is spent with them, making the most of the time that we have before they start to go off to things like university and fly the nest.
Andrew has vast experience in the social housing and technology sector, helping to identify clients’ needs and aligning them with the ideal product and service to suit. He prides himself on building strong relationships with his clients to promote ongoing and future collaboration.
Andrew’s expertise will ensure that we work together to understand your project requirements and identify how FireAngel can tailor our solutions to support the needs of your business and latest projects.
View FireAngel’s damp and mould sensing technology or discover the most technologically advanced gateway in the market, the Home Environment Gateway.
