SAP and Bristol & Weston NHS Purchasing Consortium (BWPC) have announced that SAP Ariba will drive its ‘Digital Procurement Transformation Program’, on its journey to a single modern procurement platform in the cloud. Situated as one of the UK’s largest NHS Purchasing Consortiums, BWPC will deploy SAP Ariba, with the goal to generate over £16m in savings by the year 2028.
This new partnership with SAP is aimed at streamlining sourcing, contracts, supplier risk and procure-to-pay operations across two trusts, addressing legacy technology deficits and risks. The move to SAP Ariba will help enable BWPC to provide procurement support to the ‘Healthier Together Partnership’, to improve patient care through effective management of the supply chain.
BWPC serves all aspects of clinical and non-clinical purchasing, supply chain management and capital equipping (CES). The purchasing consortium supports two NHS trusts, including North Bristol NHS Trust and University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust, representing a total of over 23,000 employees.
David Druett, director of procurement at BWPC, said: “The delivery of a comprehensive end-to-end procurement system will support our overarching vision to improve patient care through effective management of our supply chain. We look forward to partnering with SAP to help us meet our objectives and ultimately provide a better service to our customers and patients.”
Collaborations with these trusts allow for sharing of data between enterprises and establishes the best practices to maximize savings and efficiencies. BWPC works closely with each client to support compliance with all purchase-to-pay procedures and to deliver improved efficiencies in areas including automation, consolidation of invoices and strictly controlled access to purchasing systems.
BWPC will adhere to national data standards and build relevant process and integrations during the implementation of this SAP lead digital procurement platform, in order to enable collaboration with other NHS organizations that use Atamis for source to contract activity and to ensure compliance with transparency notice publication requirements.
Ellie Lamey, head of intelligent spend and business networks at SAP UKI, said: “Today’s partnership with BWPC is further proof that we are the perfect scale and innovation partner for public sector organizations. With the speed, flexibility and agility of the cloud, organizations like BWPC can effectively manage costs and spend, while future-proofing their procurement operations against what challenges may come. We’re excited to help BWPC with its procurement transformation journey and ensure it continues to deliver the best possible patient care.”
