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Plentific Labs Innovation Day 2024 Highlights
On 15 October 2024, Plentific’s London HQ hosted the first Plentific Labs Innovation Day, bringing together housing providers and contractors to explore the potential of AI, workforce efficiency, and asset management.
On the 15th of October 2024, a group of housing providers and contractors gathered at the Plentific London HQ for the inaugural Plentific Labs Innovation Day. The day featured talks from Google on the rise of AI, and insights from entrepreneurs at Venture Studio from Crisis on reducing homelessness and making affordable housing more sustainable. We focused on three key themes in housing across the three workshops held: AI and automations, internal workforce optimisation, and strategic asset management.
We found a recurring theme across discussions of the need for a centralised system, which produces and updates data on assets, properties and repairs to streamline operations, meet regulatory requirements, and boost resident satisfaction. Many housing providers face challenges with disconnected systems, and centralising data was seen as a solution to drive efficiencies and improve performance.
AI & Automations Workshop
This workshop highlighted the challenges of poor quality data preventing housing providers from being able to leverage the latest technological advances in AI and automations. We explored how AI could streamline diagnostics and maintenance, adding much-needed efficiencies and reducing repetitive work. For example, AI could help residents report repairs more accurately, even predicting maintenance needs to enable organisations to shift to a proactive, rather than reactive, model. Image processing and analysis by AI was another area we discussed - how photos of empty properties could be used to generate work orders for any repairs required to ready the property for the next tenant.
We also discussed AI’s potential to reduce no-access incidents, improve van stock management, and enhance the overall accuracy of repair reporting.
Strategic Asset Management Workshop
Asset hierarchies were the first point of discussion within the room, looking at how these could include everything from land plots to white goods. We also found that accurate data collection was a major focus for everyone, as inconsistent naming conventions and a lack of standardised processes were identified as barriers to effective asset management. Everyone agreed that centralising real-time data on asset lifecycles was essential for enabling preventative maintenance and future planning. The importance of data ownership and technological adoption within organisations was also stressed. Unsurprisingly, AI came up as a potential solution to many of the challenges we discussed, for example being able to cross reference asset warranties with repair requests to ensure that they’re directed to the correct channels. Automation was another area we discussed, with a suggestion that inspection jobs for compliance checks could be automatically sent to contractors a minimum of one month prior to certificate expiry.
Optimising Internal Workforce Management
Maximising the efficiency of direct labour organisations (DLOs) was a common challenge. Inaccurate diagnosis of repairs often resulted in operatives arriving at jobs without the correct tools or parts, or even operatives with the wrong skillset being sent. This discussion connected back to the need for real-time asset data, which could improve the accuracy of job preparation. Many attendees expressed frustration with existing scheduling systems that are inflexible and lack true dynamic scheduling capabilities. Ideas like last-mile tracking and automatic restocking of van supplies, inspired by innovations like Amazon Fresh, were raised as potential game-changers. The more farthinking amongst us in the room even shared ideas around using AI and IoT devices to create an intelligent home that diagnoses itself - as some cars are able to do this, the thought was that perhaps one day homes could as well.
A big thank you
The event brought together forward-thinking individuals from across the housing industry, and we’re excited to take these ideas forward with our product and engineering teams to better serve UK social housing. A big thank you to our friends at Direct Works for their support in publicising the event, as well as to Google Cloud and Venture Studio from Crisis for joining us to share their ideas.
