UCLH Case Study - How the Trust could save £20m over 5 years’

The Challenge
University College London Hospital (UCLH), one of the largest NHS trusts in the UK has a large number of contracts, with an annual spend on commercial suppliers of about £110m.

The Trust thought that it may be over-paying (or under-charging) its commercial partners but did not have the evidence or capacity to challenge. It did not understand its contractual obligations and important opportunities to re-negotiate terms were missed. UCLH conducted a review of their existing contract management environment and recognized that in many cases the business processes did not support the Trust’s obligations under the contracts, the relationships were not formally managed, the contracts were often changed informally or unintentionally and, the documentation was difficult to locate or was out of date.

The Solution
UCLH commenced an initiative aimed at driving improved efficiencies and savings in its commercial arrangements through an effective combination of processes and technology. As part of this initiative, UCLH commenced a proof of concept engagement with the deployment of a large client services contract (for delivering a range of technology, medical and facilities management services to a large patient care services company) for management on Sirion. This was quickly followed by a large procurement contract for IT and BPO services.

The Impact
In the summer of 2016 the implementation of the Sirion solution was completed for the first two contracts. The contracts are now stored in a fully searchable centralised document repository. All the obligations in the contracts have been captured and assigned to individuals. Similarly, all service levels are now monitored and performance is reflected in the invoice validation process. The system captures issues and actions which are all logged through the system and managed as a part of a formal governance process. Even during implementation of the first two contracts the trust found £500,000 of previous under billing and £250,000 of annual savings.