The North West NHS Collaborative Procurement Hub announces the initial results of a highly successful Business Intelligence integration project using QlikTech's QlikView.
The application has already succeeded in saving many hours of management time, and raising the profile of the North West Collaborative Procurement Hub with both the Trust bodies and throughout the NHS for its innovative approach.
The challenge for NWCPH was to achieve a standard approach to collate and consolidate data from multiple financial and purchasing systems and turn it into useful management information.
QlikTech partner, QlickiT implemented analytics tool QlikView, to enable the Hub to automatically pull together, format and present financial data from many applications throughout its 38 separate Trust sponsor bodies.
Jan Nangle, Information Services Manager at the Procurement Hub, said: "The project itself actually took under 12 weeks, less time than was agreed, and it came in absolutely on budget, with no need for extensions of any sort. This is rare for any sort of project, but for a BI project, it's a great result. We currently have more than 70 licenses of different sorts. These allow developers, category managers, and Trust stakeholders to access QlikView and get the intelligence they need to undertake their jobs more effectively, whilst improving the overall performance of the Hub."
Previously, all financial data was handled manually.
The process was undertaken annually for the primary North West Collaboration Hub reports, and on an ad-hoc basis by the Hub's category managers when they needed any specific information.
At best this all took several weeks, and by the time all the data was in, it was usually out of date.
With QlikView, both the Hub and individual Trusts can see the same information, and the flexible drill down functionality allows complete interrogation of the data.
This helps drive process improvements, monitor contract compliance with visibility of supplier spend, and build relationships with an improved understanding of the whole procurement process.
According to Nangle, the combination of QlickiT Consultancy and QlikView flexibility, have provided the Hub with much greater functionality than initially expected.
"We originally came across QlikView in other organisations, and saw that it handled exactly what we wanted (benefits reporting and cost analysis), relatively easily. Since then we've developed its use for the NHS, to include further analysis of the supplier database and purchaser hierarchies. By being able to include this level of data, we have managed to give ourselves a level of insight into potential scales of economy that has not been available before. This is an invaluable ability for an organisation that's entire existence is based on reducing costs through purchasing in bulk."
The implementation also has helped the organisation in other unexpected ways. For some time now, the North West Collaboration Procurement Hub has been growing to incorporate a wider geographical area. Most recently the Cheshire and Mersey areas were added to its remit, and it is currently in the process of adding the Cumbria and Lancashire Trusts. QlikView and QlickiT has smoothed this process by simplifying and speeding up the integration of data from the Trusts into the Hub.
QlikView has also helped grow cross trust and inter-hub communication and collaboration.
In turn, this cross-Trust activity has extended the value and the profile of the Hub to each of these sponsors like never before and actually helped justify the Hub's existence even further. According to Nangle, this project is viewed as not just innovative within the Trusts, but is actually considered to be leading the way for future NHS management intelligence across the UK.
"In the NHS, there is an almost overwhelming amount of data around, but very little information. People look to the Hubs to guide them around this issue, and QlikView and QlickiT has given us a tool to do this with," she said. Nangle believes that simplicity is at the heart of the Hubs success with BI.
"One of the product's strongest selling points internally, is exactly the reason we chose QlikView above any of the alternatives - its simplicity. Training can be done en-masse in a two hour session, and because people understand it, they use it regularly. If we'd chosen an alternative BI solution, there's every chance its complexity would have scared people off, and it never would have been used properly. This is far from the case with QlikView, where people are constantly asking me for more and more applications.
"It's clear that we haven't yet scratched the surface of what we can do with this software. I can quite easily see us doing a lot more with this and sharing even more information in six months time," she concludes.
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