The national procurement and logistics agency has signed a £9m contract with Deloitte to replace the ageing, complex and inflexible systems trusts use to order products.
NHS Supply Chain will pay the digital arm of the management consultancy £9.3m over the next five years to deploy and run a new online system for viewing and ordering products, known as a digital commerce platform.
It aims to be “a single tailored and intuitive order and order management platform,” according to a procurement notice published last week.
This will replace a range of legacy systems, some of which “are over 30 years old, unstable, aren’t flexible and are unable to adapt to our strategy or external changes,” the notice added.
Deloitte will supply its “commerce hub solution utilising the commercetools platform,” an NHSSC spokesperson said. This system is “established and proven in the market, as it is used by leading retailers, among others”.
The new platform should “provide NHS trusts with a consistent, user-friendly, and efficient solution for ordering products”. It will be “managed and hosted by Deloitte”.
The plan is to roll out to NHS trusts over the next two years, starting with a pilot of six trusts that have formed a customer board to advise and support the installation process. NHSSC declined to name the six pilot sites and said the plan for the full rollout of the system to the remaining trusts in England, including the timetable for it, is still being developed.
This is the latest step in NHSSC’s ongoing efforts to overhaul and refresh the digital and physical infrastructure that underpins its operations in England. This wider transformation aims to fix the underlying causes of several issues with NHSSC’s service, which have been a source of frustration among local procurement leaders.
The new service should improve “the experience of using our service and making it easier to work with us as well as delivering savings,” the spokesperson said.
Speaking last year, NHSSC’s chief executive Andrew New told HSJ his agency’s existing “electronic front door” held back its efforts to improve the service it offers.
The different ways in which trusts could engage with NHSSC and order products created a degree of complexity when NHSSC needed to give “more transparent information” on where stock was held and not held, Mr New said.
Simplifying and automating processes should make it easier and quicker for procurement teams and clinicians to order replacement products and consumables.
“It’s all about taking some of those manual things out that prevent them from being really quick in their decision making and really putting the control in the hands of the user to say ‘yes that’s the old version, this is the new version, let’s swap,’” he added.
Source: HSJ
Date: 10 July