Change and Transformation in the Public Sector
Our transformation programme revolutionised procurement in the NHS by consolidating procurement from nine separate organisations into a single shared service, while delivering £12.6m in savings.
Delivering transformation in the UK’s National Health Service is notoriously hard. With the constant pressure of life-or-death healthcare delivery, limited funding, and a highly complex environment, change is incredibly difficult to achieve.
Prior to the start of the transformation, procurement across North West London Integrated Care System (NWL ICS) was largely decentralised with 140 staff working across seven different procurement teams (in different legal entities) supporting nine NHS organisations. Our project revolutionised procurement in the NHS by consolidating procurement from nine separate NHS organisations into a single shared procurement service, managing £6.4 billion of public spend to deliver improved healthcare to over 2m people in North West London.
The transformation sought to resolve significant challenges, including duplication of procurement activity across the different organisations, fragmented governance, inconsistent strategy, increasing supply chain risk, limited alignment or development of collaborative strategies across the organisations (despite procuring similar or the same goods/services in the main), poor monitoring and tracking of KPI’s and procurement metrics, inconsistent policies reducing compliance, lack of procurement planning, and all while reducing cost to the public purse.
We transitioned 140 staff into a unified organisation, restructured it into a category management function, introduced contract and supplier relationship management, and significantly improved the maturity of process, governance, policy and technology. Given the client’s financial pressures, we also deployed a team to deliver in-year cash savings, achieving £12.6m in 12 months to both fund the transformation programme and deliver a significant net return.
This transformation is unprecedented within the NHS as it will see NWL become one of the pioneering organisations to implement a shared procurement service. At the beginning of 2023, we successfully completed our 12-month transformation programme, delivering it with zero additional funds (additional savings had to be delivered alongside to fund the programme), which is a tremendous achievement.
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