ePROCUREMENT & eINVOICING XXXX
Delivering efficiency through eInvoicing
Simon Murphy, NHS Shared Business Services director of finance and accounting, gives his thoughts on why implementing eInvoicing can help save the NHS time and money.
S
ince Francis Maude launched the ‘digital by default’ strategy in 2012, there has been
a big push within the public sector, from local councils to central government, to implement IT initiatives that collectively aim to save billions of pounds annually.
Most commonly we hear about the adoption of cloud or introduction of ‘bring your own device’ policies as drivers of these cost savings, but we are now also seeing other solutions implemented to improve fundamental processes.
faster payments, reduces errors and the vast amount of paper circulating inside an organisation. But cost, usability and adoption has always been the barrier.
“100% adoption of eInvoicing would eliminate roughly 14 million pieces of paper – plus the envelopes they all come in.”
Take payments, for example. If you consider that a paper invoice takes approximately 20 minutes to process – wasting time and money – it makes complete sense to transform this procedure with business tools that are readily available.
NHS Shared Business Services (SBS) recently partnered with Tradeshift to address this, and has completely transformed the payments process within the NHS by implementing its eInvoicing platform. Since the Tradeshift platform processes invoices electronically, we can eradicate 30,000 daily payment related paper documents from nearly 200,000 NHS suppliers.
NHS resources, and ultimately public money, can be directed towards other value adding services. Added to this, the platform will enable NHS suppliers to send business documents more quickly and efficiently, enabling faster payments on invoices. It will also allow tracking of invoices across their lifecycle, helping resolve delays and disputes.
Conceptually, no one argues with eInvoicing. It’s an enabler for supply chain finance, helps
94 | national health executive Sep/Oct 14
The problem is that many eInvoicing suppliers charge around 10-20p per invoice, on top of initial fees and upfront costs. They’re also clunky platforms that don’t reflect the modern software we use in our daily lives.
In contrast to this,
Tradeshift is free for suppliers and the platform resembles the look and feel of commonly used social media sites like Facebook, as well as being optimised for mobile and tablet. These two factors totally change the face of eInvoicing, leaving only benefits to implementation.
As a result, we expect between 90% and 100% of our clients and suppliers to be on board within three years and, added to this, we expect eInvoicing to lay the foundation for a wider eCommerce strategy within the NHS.
The Tradeshift platform has only been live for a short time but we’re already seeing benefits. For example, our invoice procedure requires us to tally against 15 checks, such as tax amount, date and invoice number. This is often where errors occur when suppliers produce invoices, but Tradeshift seamlessly deals with a great deal of the checks that previously caused problems, up front at the point of invoice submission.
It’s a little bit like when you are booking a plane journey – you input all the relevant information at the start, and you can’t move on until you’ve entered everything correctly. This saves a lot of rework and, as a result, we’ve already seen 15% fewer calls through the invoicing process from suppliers in our pilot project.
More broadly, this move plays into the NHS’s overall paperless strategy. We deal with seven million paper invoices a year and we estimate that each invoice uses approximately two pieces of paper. This means that 100% adoption of eInvoicing would eliminate roughly 14 million pieces of paper – plus the envelopes they all come in!
This announcement is a significant step for NHS SBS, our clients and the thousands of suppliers who work with us throughout the UK. We want it to become a template for how to efficiently and effectively manage payments within public sector organisations and we are looking forward to further exploring other exciting aspects of eCommerce within the NHS.
About the author
As director of Finance and Accounting (F&A) for NHS Shared Business Services (NHS SBS), Simon Murphy oversees the delivery of financial support services to the NHS. One of four business lines in NHS SBS, F&A processes over £100bn each year on behalf of over 300 NHS organisations. It employs about 1,300 people in four centres. Murphy previously worked in finance in both the private sector and the NHS, and has spent over 11 years at NHS SBS working in every area of the F&A business. He became director in 2012.
Simon Murphy
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