Sanctuary

• Industry: Social housing operator and care home provider
• Employees: 9,895 employees (2022)
• Turnover: £812.5 million (2022)
• Website: www.sanctuary.co.uk

One of the UK’s leading providers of housing, care and commercial services, Sanctuary manages over 105,000 homes throughout England and Scotland, including general rented, retirement living, care homes, supported housing, student and key worker accommodation.

The first wave of the COVID-19 outbreak in the UK had a significant impact on Sanctuary as it cares for and houses some of the most vulnerable people in our society. With the pandemic spreading, at a speed unseen in our lifetime, Group companies, Sanctuary Care and Sanctuary Supported Living needed to understand and monitor the impact of the virus across their care homes and do all they could to protect their 4,500 residents and 6,500 colleagues. To achieve this, Sanctuary needed to unify data sources and rapidly access current and informative analytics. This needed to be done by monitoring and modelling the number of incidents across England and Scotland in order to inform the direct response.

Partnering with NTT DATA Business Solutions, Sanctuary was able to create a data unification platform that integrated critical disparate data sets and provided access to real-time interactive insights on the impact of COVID-19.

This enabled Sanctuary to understand the health impact to customers and front line team members as well as introducing operational changes to limit future exposure to the virus.

The pandemic response has without doubt accelerated Sanctuary’s data and analytics journey and created an appetite across the organisation for modern analytics. Sanctuary has now moved the analytics project away from crisis mode and transformed it into a sustainable, long-term deployment. With COVID-19 learnings applied, the organisation is now building a group-wide data and analytics strategy that will provide the ability to bring together disparate data to gain intelligent actionable insights into 100,000+ properties together with over 250,000 customers.

The critical analytics work was also recognised by SAP UKI with Sanctuary winning the SAP Customer Success Award for the Best Socially Sustainable Project. Kevin concluded, “I’m delighted the team has been recognised for this award as it represents a number of our company values – quality, sustainability, ambition – as well as our social purpose, helping our communities.