Alteryx > Case Studies > Automation in Healthcare: CPP's Journey to Reduce NHS Procurement Costs with Alteryx

Automation in Healthcare: CPP's Journey to Reduce NHS Procurement Costs with Alteryx

Technology Category

Robots - Collaborative Robots

Applicable Industries

Equipment & Machinery
Healthcare & Hospitals

Applicable Functions

Maintenance
Procurement

Use Cases

Leasing Finance Automation
Material Handling Automation

About The Customer

The Collaborative Procurement Partnership (CPP) is a healthcare organization owned by four NHS trusts. It manages three major contracts within the NHS Supply Chain Operating Model. CPP works with 545 suppliers across five categories, dealing with almost 370,000 different products. The organization undertakes a massive amount of data processing and analysis, dealing with millions of data points. CPP's main goal is to make better-informed decisions about procurement, driving down costs without impacting the quality of clinical care, and ensuring medical professionals are equipped with the best-quality tools.

The Challenge

The Collaborative Procurement Partnership (CPP), owned by four NHS trusts, manages three major contracts within the NHS Supply Chain Operating Model. The volume and variety of data CPP deals with daily are immense, working with 545 suppliers across five categories, translating to almost 370,000 different products. Each product could have more than 30 different pricing options, resulting in millions of data points to consider. In early 2019, CPP undertook a data and analytics review, revealing that they were not making the best use of all that data. Their existing system was heavily manual and resource-intensive, with most of their time and effort spent on data processing, not analysis.

The Solution

CPP turned to Alteryx to automate their data processing and analysis. They created a five-stage automated workflow using Alteryx. First, batch macros process all the relevant files, loading and mass-cleansing the data in less than a minute. The workflow then normalizes the data to ensure CPP’s systems can read it properly, before automatically loading it into a consolidated catalogue on CPP’s SQL database. There’s also a business-as-usual workflow which automatically updates the catalogue as suppliers add, change, or remove products. The team’s benchmarking workflow then uses the catalogue to assess a trust’s spend against the product list, ensuring the appropriate prices and discounts are applied. It outputs the results as a bespoke spreadsheet of quantitative and visual summaries, which include vital metrics that help track general spending, off-contract spend, and potential savings.

Operational Impact

The automation process has ensured consistency and integrity in the way CPP handles data, reducing susceptibility to errors. It has also simplified data analysis from a technical perspective, helping CPP’s analysts manage their workloads more effectively. The low maintenance nature of Alteryx after the initial build has allowed all team members to process and create reports through Alteryx, regardless of their coding skills. The CPP team is now looking at automating other data feeds beyond the pricing spreadsheets. With the success of its Alteryx Designer deployment, CPP is also migrating to Alteryx Server, which will help create a complete automated ecosystem, allowing its analysts to focus on saving the NHS even more on its procurement costs.

Quantitative Benefit