NHS Procurement & Community

• Maverick or devolved spending/purchasing
• Time and resources required to outweigh potential savings
• Many suppliers
• Unsuitable systems and processes
• Compliance and transparency
• Lack of market intelligence
• Complacent suppliers
• Difficult to control Tail-Spend
• Difficult to quickly identify savings opportunities

• Centralised purchasing
• Efficient and inexpensive process to challenge expenditure
• Consolidation of suppliers
• Dedicated Tail-Spend solution, with supplier marketplace
• Transparent procurement, i.e., publishing to Contracts Finder

• Responsive fully managed supplier real-time marketplace with access to over 10,000 suppliers for tail end spend
• Average savings of 12.5% realised by users
• Dynamic pricing
• Manage competition
• Market testing
• Identify new suppliers
• Fully managed marketplace
• Responsive supplier marketplace
• Fast turnaround and guaranteed responses to customer timescales
• Product-level data capture
• Integration to Contracts Finder, Find a Tender and OJEU
• Web-based helpdesk

“No Tail. Everything is on contract”
Its widely acknowledged that Tail-Spend exists in all organisations

“We don’t control the spend”
This can be solved by centralising procurement.

“Don’t have the resources”
This can be solved by using the right solutions.

“The savings opportunity is overstated”
Explained with the confusion of Non-Pay Expenditure (NPE) & Supplies Spend

“We have eSourcing already”
eSourcing isn’t suitable for Tail-Spend and savings are not being delivered

“Not suitable for medical”
Medical items attract high volumes of responses, yielding significant savings

• Takes too long and generates a lot of paper
• Difficult to control and audit
• Procurement staff lack necessary knowledge and expertise
• Existing eTender solutions
• Are too complex
• Are not user friendly or intuitive
• Have long implementation timescales
• Allow deviation from legal process
• Support staff are too technical and do not understand procurement process

• Simple and intuitive approach
• Enforces compliance with legal and regulatory requirements.
• Fully trained and experienced support team
• Single Public Sector supplier database, with free registration
• Full integration with Sourcing Cloud Contract
• Rapid deployment so customers can be up and running in under a week.

e-Auction allows suppliers to compete with one another in a real-time bidding environment. You can manage complex and challenging negotiations using multiple formats. Provides procurement professionals with competitive prices generating significant cost savings for your procurement department. This negotiation tool will help reduce procurement costs through increased market transparency and competitive bidding and provide the ability to run both reverse and forward auctions. It will allow multiple suppliers in different geographic regions to place and modify bids simultaneously online and respond immediately to other bidders competing against them in a compliant manner. The e-Auction tool will give buyers the ability to customise e-auctions to their requirements and allow each supplier to view their bid position and/or the value of the lowest bid with the identity of the supplier/s being withheld.

• Manage tenders, suppliers, and contracts in a single solution
• Publish Contract Notices
• Manage Tender Exercises
• Conduct Collaborative Procurement
• Manage and engage Suppliers
• Make efficiency savings to improve procurement processes
• Create your own procurement package for your organisation
• Manage current and historical contracts
• Reduce the cost of supply and lower risk
• Increase efficiencies in the process
• Delivers secure collaborative working across multiple teams and/or locations
• Widen the range of suppliers
• Facilitate communications with suppliers
• A cost-effective solution for high and low-value tendering
• Drives supplier engagement, optimising supply chain
• Complete end-to-end solution or flexible

• Challenging to manage supplier performance, including KPI’s.
• No single register of current and historical contracts
• Difficult to control and audit.
• No ongoing management of the contract post-competition

• Have poor integration with eTender.
• Do not capture organisation-specific information.
• Have long implementation timescales.
• Are not user-friendly or intuitive.

• Simple and intuitive approach
• Easy to deploy
• Full audit trail
• Ensures stringent supplier management and control
• Supplier and contract management
• Fully trained and experienced support team
• Reports and dashboards
• Full integration with eTender
• Rapid deployment so customers can be up and running in under a week.

Catalogue management is the most important element of any hospital materials management service. A single source (collaborative) product catalogue and system with the capacity to manage all medical inventory and manufacturer barcode scanning within a hospital department is essential.

Too often, hospitals are operating with multiple high and low-value inventory systems. When these systems exist in silos, it poses a challenge for businesses looking to make data-driven decisions, as not all members of the organisation are operating off the same data. Modern businesses are now moving toward a single source of truth model to overcome this challenge and recognise HOSLO as a GS1-certified standalone or ‘primary single source of truth location’ where datasets are aggregated across multiple systems through strategic integration and interfacing.

Recognising the importance of Integrated Care Boards and Procurement Business Partners, there is an opportunity to enhance the HOSLO catalogue by linking products to specific care groups and procurement business partners to help associate and filter KPI performance, data and transactions by hospital, department, and trust, to these groups and key business stakeholders.

Over the years, procurement professionals have focused on 5 key pain points. Between 10-20% of organisations globally still do not have any P2P solution in place: Spend analytics and visibility become crucial as procurement professionals play a much more active role in business decisions. P2P digitalisation is now a must-have and no longer a nice-to-have.

• Paper-based & Manual Processes
• Multiple tools – System Fragmentation
• Poor Spend Analytics & Visibility
• Rigid Governance & Compliance
• Duplication & Redundancy

• Publish and manage supplier catalogues.
• Search easily and thoroughly for goods and services
• Configure your own business rules to automate processing.
• Create requisitions and purchase orders efficiently and safely.
• Connect easily with suppliers.
• Receive and seamlessly match receipts and invoices.
• Provide bespoke reporting and analytics.
• Seamlessly integrate with Finance and/or 3rd party systems
• No change needed: our eP2P solution adapts to your technology and business needs. Depending on your requirements, we offer several plug-and-play features to choose from

If procurement is a pain point for your organisation, P2P can offer substantial benefits. Organisations have reported that an optimised P2P system can save between 30% and 50% of purchase order and invoice costs, with the overall cost of supply chain management lowering by 15-20%. Let’s look in more detail at how P2P leads to valuable savings for a broad range of organisations. The P2P system delivers valuable savings for businesses in several different ways. For every £10 invested in an eProcurement system, businesses can see savings of up to £72. These substantial savings mean businesses increasingly see the benefit of investing in technological procurement solutions, thus making P2P systems a much more widely used business tool.

• Lower transaction costs significantly
• Back-office efficiencies
• Simple to implement and achieve ROI.
• Control costs and spend.
• Data accuracy, visibility, and transparency
• Detailed analytics and reporting
• Compliance and governance

Elcom has been running the Scottish Government’s PECOS P2P system since 2002, processing over £6.5bn of Scottish Public Sector spending yearly. Lynn Wisener, Former Deputy Director, stated: “…now we got hundred and eighteen public bodies in Scotland using PECOS. PECOS not only does bring efficiencies and effectiveness to the P2P process but allows our customers to help one another and share learnings and best practice. This collaborative environment they have created amongst themselves has been critical to the success of rolling out PECOS.” PECOS P2P is part of the Scottish Government eCommerce Shared Service.

The solution has been available since 2002 to all Scottish public sector bodies, including central and local government, NHS Boards, universities, and colleges. In 2021, Elcom was recognised as a Technology Leader in Quadrant Knowledge Solutions’ (QKS) SPARK Matrix™ for Procure-to-Pay (P2P). QKS named Elcom’s P2P solution the most versatile and integration-friendly solution in the SPARK Matrix analysis of the global eProcurement market. The study includes a detailed analysis of global market dynamics and major trends.

• Quick to implement and achieve ROI
• Control costs and greater economies of scale
• Leverage supplier trading relationships
• Facilitate early payment discounts
• Improve spend analytics and reporting
• Increase focus on all savings opportunities.
• Single point of connectivity for suppliers
• Lower transaction costs significantly
• Achieve back-office efficiencies
• Contract compliance, governance, and auditability
• Data accuracy and transparency
• Manage purchasing processes via one system