NHS Institute Case Study - 2009 - Page 2

NHS Institute embraces eSourcing

The objective was clear from the outset - to find the most effective process to meet the challenge faced by the NHS Institute procurement team. In pursuit of this goal, the NHS Institute chose to outsource its strategic procurement support. In conjunction with Ashgreen and Curtis Fitch, the NHS Institute delivered the best solution that would use resources more efficiently, reduce timescales and manage financial budgets more effectively.

Following review of the background and NHS Institute objectives, it was recognised that the goals could be achieved by implementing a suite of eSourcing solutions and identified that such solutions would be provided most effectively by an organisation that had development control over the software, would react quickly and had substantial private sector experience.

Curtis Fitch have many large private sector companies as established clients and have been very effective in developing and implementing successful procurement process changes in those companies. The NHS Institute chose Curtis Fitch as the eSourcing providers who were the most likely to achieve the necessary collective buy-in of private sector best practices within a public sector organisation. It was clear to the NHS Institute that eSourcing, in general, and Curtis Fitch iSource™, in particular, would deliver the target savings and provide ongoing solutions to sustain an environment of dynamic and cost-effective procurement.

Success: Transformation of Procurement

The benefits of eSourcing were immediate and transformed the procurement process. Some of the headline results are shown below and are representative of the savings in cost and time achieved since the new streamlined procurement processes were introduced by the NHS Institute.

As a clear example of the empowerment delivered by eSourcing, during the period from December 2007 to February 2008, the new process cost £70,000. This included all employee costs, outsourced service costs and the investment in Curtis Fitch iSource™. The savings achieved during the same period amounted to £910,000 - 13 times the outlay.

An immediate example of the cost effectiveness of eSourcing was the tender for the re-procurement of specialist library services, involving 28 libraries and a 3 year contract worth £6million. Through Curtis Fitch iSource™ the NHS Institute have been enabled to devote more time and energy to post-tender negotiations and have secured savings of £1.1million for the specialist libraries over the 3 year contract period.

Illustrative examples of time efficiency for OJEU procurements were delivered by the award of Regional Field Team contracts, in 11 weeks from start to finish, which established Strategic Health Authorities and thereby provided NHS organizations with localized points of contact for all the NHS Institute products, development programmes and intellectual resourcing.

The most effective and comparable example of increased time efficiency is the NHS Institute tender in April 2008 for suppliers to the marketing communications support framework, which required nearly six months using traditional methods in 2006, but is expected to complete by 1st July 2008 - nearly 3 months faster despite greater category complexity.

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