National Health Service Improves invoicing with Everteam Intelligent Business Process Management
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About NHS Shared Business Services
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NHS Shared Business Services is a unique joint venture between the Department of Health and Sopra Steria, a multinational information technology company. NHS Shared Business Services is the largest provider of business support services to the NHS in England, providing financial services to 100% of all NHS Commissioning organizations and the full range of services for around 30% of NHS Provider organizations. Solutions and services specifically designed for the NHS include finance and accounting, employment services, and procurement.
Employing more than 1800 who bring a unique mix of NHS and commercial expertise., NHS SBS provides business services to the National Health Service (NHS) more efficiently than NHS could internally, delivering savings of over £224 million. The SBS works with over a third of NHS Trusts and with 100% of the NHS Commissioning organizations, providing a high level of governance and accountability for around £100 billion of NHS spending. NHS SBS services and solutions ensure cost improvements and efficiency savings, as well as improved data management and reporting providing average cost improvements of between 20% and 40% for clients.
The Business Challenge
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Efficient procurement and subsequent prompt settling of accounts is critical to the health of any business. In the healthcare business it can directly impact supplies and staffing — and thus health of humans. Shared Business Services had implemented a custom solution to manage procurement and automate the manual entry for financial coding of AP invoices. Scanning was performed using a 3rd party tool and the AP invoice images were processed by image recognition software to extract their information. Alternatively they were routed automatically to a dedicated team for manual processing.
The system was good, but SBS also knew it could be better. SBS sought to further decrease manual processing, refine automatic processing, increase verification efficiency, and introduce the ability to track all documents in the system. SBS turned to everteam.ibpms to increase procurement efficiency, improve e-invoicing, and improve savings.
The Everteam Solution
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Working in partnership with SBS and Sopra Steria staff, Everteam enabled a new technology solution to implement eInvoicing. Fully integrated with existing NHS SBS infrastructure, the solution supports scanned paper invoicing, and drives processes that reduce human error and increase invoicing timeliness. Everteam actively engaged and involved stakeholders to achieve business objectives, encouraging those who would be using the system to participate in process modeling and technical implementation of the solution. After committing to the Everteam solution in 2014, initial deployment occurred in 4 months. Roll-outs of new processes continue on a regular basis.
Benefits Using everteam Business Process Management For Healthcare
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NHS SBS started realizing benefits from the everteam.ibpms* solution immediately upon roll-out, including:
Security
The archiving process validates the data on secure servers. This helps ensure that not only is the data safe, it’s correct. If and when it needs to be retrieved, company staff has confidence in the accuracy of produced records.
Compliance
Application archiving meets all legal and best practices standards for retention, security, organization, and data access.
Lower Storage Costs
Moving data out of native applications into lower cost tiered storage environments is more cost effective than leaving the data in native applications. With a lower cost per byte and better searchability, moving the data is more efficient than leaving it alone.
Improved Analytics
The ability to apply Everteam’s advanced data analytics to the tables of structured data enables the company to not only store legacy data, but also use it as a knowledge source for future decision making. Intelligent analytics allows staff to evaluate the data in new and different ways, identify trends, and apply that knowledge to strategic decision making.
Scalability
As the business evolves, the company can add more types of flows to the archive process, and thus more tables to everteam.archive, further taking advantage of storage cost savings and leveraging its confidence in the archiving process.
Search
If anything, the company archived data is more accessible than it was in native applications. Consistent data tables and format in everteam.archive allows the data to be searched faster and smarter, and allows for connections to be made between data that originally was from different systems.
