By Ben Turner
At the recent BravoConnect conference, I attended a session led by Scott Pryde, which explored the role of Spend Analytics and Benchmarking, with a focus on Public Sector Healthcare. The audience was highly diverse, representing 41 organisations from industries ranging from waste management to luxury goods.
The presentation began with an introduction which felt like it could have fitted in almost any topic. Technology is a disruptive force, we were told. Smartphones are now everywhere. For example, with a nod to the healthcare emphasis, a wide range of social fitness apps are available, which monitor your running or cycling speed and distance, and sometimes even your heart rate. Increasingly users are sharing their results with friends and colleagues. That’s all very well- I’m a recent adopter of such an app myself- but what has it got to do with Spend Analytics?
Scott then introduced Dave Coley, Procurement Director of the Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust. He presented a bleak picture of the current position of the trust, which after a number of years of success has recently posted its first budget deficit. At the same time, demand is growing at unprecedented rates, and multiple external government agencies are placing new scrutiny on the quality of the Trust’s services. Clearly there has never been a more urgent case for the cost savings in the NHS.
Faced with this daunting situation, the challenge was then put to the audience: If you were the next Procurement star for the NHS, what would you do? Fortunately, we weren’t to go unarmed into this challenge; Heart of England is one of a number of NHS Trusts who have supplied their spend data to BravoSolution, who now have a picture of 10-15% of the total third party spend data of NHS England. This data was shared with the audience for this exercise.
[How did the audience react to this challenging question? Find out in part 2 ]
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