Presenter: Rob Cooper

Rob Cooper is Deputy Chief Executive at the West Yorkshire Strategic Health Authority. He is talking about something called ‘shared business services’. This is a centre which consolidates transaction processing (it seems to be in both a physical and virtual sense). So bringing together processing of payroll, accounting, procurement etc.

All sounds very worthy – but I’m finding it hard to get excited. Of course, £224m saved over 4 years is hardly to be sniffed at. But Rob is saying it isn’t significant in terms of NHS. He doesn’t believe this is where benefit is going to be for the NHS.

Some great double-speak here – if an Invoice without a PO is received in the Shared Service Centre, a “custom workflow notification is triggered” – i.e. an email is sent.

Some nice stuff on what the budget holder gets out of it. Daily reports on invoices paid, with drill down into the detail, down to the actual invoice that has been scanned in.

Despite the fact I find it hard to get very excited about all this, it does provoke some thought about how we could look at reporting from the budgetary control in our library management system (my own bias of course, if I understood more about our finance system, I expect I’d see the possibilities there as well). Could we think about scanning in our invoices (would it be worth it?). What daily reports should be given to the budget holders in the library (yesterday you bought…)

Suprisingly (perhaps – although this isn’t really an IT presentation) no mention of electronic invoicing, which our library is now doing for Serials invoicing from certain suppliers (Swets and EBSCO at the moment)

Rob is now getting down to what he sees as the real benefits once you centralize payment processing. You can see what is bought from where – and what you paid for it. He has thrown up a slide which shows the variety of prices paid for the same thing, from the same suppliers, across 3 trusts in the Health authority – they vary considerably – so immediately you can see where savings can be made.

Presenter: Rob Cooper

Rob Cooper is Deputy Chief Executive at the West Yorkshire Strategic Health Authority. He is talking about something called ‘shared business services’. This is a centre which consolidates transaction processing (it seems to be in both a physical and virtual sense). So bringing together processing of payroll, accounting, procurement etc.

All sounds very worthy – but I’m finding it hard to get excited. Of course, £224m saved over 4 years is hardly to be sniffed at. But Rob is saying it isn’t significant in terms of NHS. He doesn’t believe this is where benefit is going to be for the NHS.

Some great double-speak here – if an Invoice without a PO is received in the Shared Service Centre, a “custom workflow notification is triggered” – i.e. an email is sent.

Some nice stuff on what the budget holder gets out of it. Daily reports on invoices paid, with drill down into the detail, down to the actual invoice that has been scanned in.

Despite the fact I find it hard to get very excited about all this, it does provoke some thought about how we could look at reporting from the budgetary control in our library management system (my own bias of course, if I understood more about our finance system, I expect I’d see the possibilities there as well). Could we think about scanning in our invoices (would it be worth it?). What daily reports should be given to the budget holders in the library (yesterday you bought…)

Suprisingly (perhaps – although this isn’t really an IT presentation) no mention of electronic invoicing, which our library is now doing for Serials invoicing from certain suppliers (Swets and EBSCO at the moment)

Rob is now getting down to what he sees as the real benefits once you centralize payment processing. You can see what is bought from where – and what you paid for it. He has thrown up a slide which shows the variety of prices paid for the same thing, from the same suppliers, across 3 trusts in the Health authority – they vary considerably – so immediately you can see where savings can be made.