Anchor was the winner of the Innovation category at the Housing Technology Awards 2025. Julia Mixter from Anchor explains how the housing and care provider is now driving digital innovation across its operations and transforming ways of working for its staff.
All housing providers need to innovate to get the best use out of their technology to improve the customer experience. For me, innovation involves collaboration with forward-thinking partners and adjacent thinking. This happened when Anchor and Plentific came together and saw the potential for Plentific to operate as an integration layer for us, unifying Anchor’s contracting partners.
The challenge
Our challenge was that our repairs supply chain and ways of working were largely the same as they were prior to the Anchor-Hanover merger in 2018, with three large regional repair and maintenance contractors and multiple smaller local contractors.
Our legacy systems weren’t integrated or unified and didn’t provide the functionality we needed, such as uploading photos of repairs. With Anchor operating across more than 85 per cent of England’s local councils, managing repairs was becoming a much bigger part of the day jobs of our operational colleagues than it should have been, which was getting in the way of them delivering their core role of focusing on residents. There was also limited visibility of contractors’ performance and service outcomes, making it difficult to ensure value for money for our residents.
Furthermore, our existing systems were unsuitable for adaptation to more efficient ways of working (e.g. it could take up to 44 mouse clicks to raise a repair order). We needed a system to efficiently raise an order, enabling colleagues and residents to track and understand the status of that order. The cost and lead-time to self-build the required system integration would take too long, presenting a risk to Anchor’s housing business.
The solution
Plentific’s platform is being deployed as an integration layer to unify Anchor’s contracting partners, digitalising operations for Anchor’s main contractors and sub-contractors, building a resilient solution with wider supplier visibility.
Plentific is our central hub for Anchor’s 180,000 work orders per year, integrating seamlessly with the contractors delivering the services. Plentific is providing a single real-time platform, connecting Anchor’s colleagues and residents with contractors across 1,700 sites, digitalising the supply chain and adding value via a frictionless and more responsive solution to managing property operations.
Using Plentific’s system, our staff now have much better visibility of repairs; for example, they can take a photograph or video of the problem, thereby helping with triaging. The status of orders can also be tracked, with the ability to carry out repairs fast and efficiently being central to our residents’ experience. An Anchor colleague said, “I’ve never had a system so visible. If I was selling the dream, it would be the visibility and knock-on effect for customers.”
Plentific listened to Anchor’s existing customers, building a product that took into account similar requirements across a multiple-customer base, thereby reducing the need for significant variations and speeding up the time to deployment. Plentific’s platform provides our integration layer, enabling us to improve our service to residents, with simpler interfaces, enhanced workflows and better automation.
The results
The full optimisation of processes, including embedding and integration, is on track for completion in June 2025, with the whole process expected to have been completed within only eight months owing to Plentific’s configurable system. We estimate that around £1.7bn of Anchor’s repairs and planned works will be facilitated by Plentific’s software over the next 10 years.
Plentific’s solution is saving an average of three minutes to raise each repair compared with raising repairs via our housing management system. With 180,000 repairs raised per year across Anchor’s properties, this equates to 9,000 hours or 375 days of time saved.
Plentific’s platform will also enable a number of other automations, including work-order management for proactive planned and reactive maintenance and inspections as well as to support our supply chain, voids and compliance management. The platform includes a marketplace of local SME contractors, supporting Anchor’s communities with a range of vetted contractors who can carry out local repairs.
Our innovative repairs service demonstrates the transformative potential of using a single platform to unify operations, reduce operational waste, remove process frictions as well as enabling a large reduction in costs.
Julia Mixter is the executive director for business services at Anchor. The housing and care provider was the Winner of the Innovation category at the Housing Technology Awards 2025.
