“I led the business change activity for NHS Shared Business Services following its creation”
NHS Shared Business Services provides Finance and Accounting services to NHS organisations. It is a Joint Venture between the Department of Health and Xansa, designed to enable NHS organisations to improve the efficiency of their finance function, and thereby free up funds for frontline care.
When Xansa PLC, now Steria, won the contract to form a joint venture with the UK Department of Health to run its financial service centres in March 2005, I was engaged by the joint venture as interim Change Director to set-up and lead a business and systems change programme to allow a 3-fold increase in operating capacity and a 35% improvement in efficiency in the back office shared service centre for Europe’s largest employer, the National Health Service. This involved re-engineering the operations in Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Financial Accounting, VAT, Cash Management and Management Reporting.
I led a team comprising a number of business and technology consultants engaged in process re-engineering, organisational design and change, and systems implementation. The end goal was a highly standardised and automated operation providing consistency of delivery and control and a significant improvement in operating efficiency.
Following this interim management assignment, I was engaged on further consulting projects to:
- Carry out a benefits review for an NHS Trust client, identifying both the extent of benefits realised and opportunities available for wider operational re-engineering available post-outsource,
- Design & develop a detailed metrics framework and reporting pack to support the multi-client shared service centre, across Finance & Accounting, HR and Procurement services. This enabled drill down from top-level KPIs into detailed metrics by process and by client.