NHS Shared Business Services transforms its supply chain with Tradeshift
NHS Shared Business Services adopts Tradeshift, a business platform that enhances the payments process, eradicates paper invoicing and can improve payment times for suppliers
NHS Shared Business Services (NHS SBS) has announced a partnership with Tradeshift, the fastest-growing platform helping hundreds of thousands of businesses transact, connect and collaborate.
Using the Tradeshift platform, NHS SBS will help transform the NHS supply chain by encouraging suppliers to its NHS clients to submit and track their invoices electronically, making payments more efficient, reducing the burden on NHS resources, and helping suppliers receive payments more quickly.
NHS SBS provides business support in the areas of finance and accounting, employment services, procurement, and primary care services. This support depends on a complex network of external partners, suppliers and departments, with up to 30,000 paper invoices processed daily. As the Tradeshift platform processes invoices electronically, the need to manually manage paper documents is completely eradicated, freeing up resources and reducing rework.
The platform – which is free and always will be to suppliers – will enable NHS SBS to optimise processes, increase control and add value right across the supply chain
The platform enables invoices to be scanned, verified and tallied against 15 checks, significantly reducing the margin for error. It enables suppliers to connect and interact with clients of NHS SBS throughout the payments process, making it transparent to all parties. With late payments along the supply chain increasingly damaging the solvency of businesses in the UK, the ability to accurately and swiftly process and pay invoices is a vital and ethical driver for the partnership.
Simon Murphy, NHS SBS director of finance and accounting, said: “We are constantly looking to make business processes as efficient as possible in order to derive maximum value from NHS resources. Tradeshift enables us to do exactly that.
“Implementing e-Invoicing is an incredibly important step for us in simplifying and modernising supplier interactions on behalf of our clients, by allowing our organisation and our suppliers to focus on value-adding activities. We are looking forward to seeing the benefits throughout the supply chain. Tradeshift also gives us a brilliant platform for better collaboration, and will allow us to scale up and evolve with suppliers, as well as introduce innovative solutions.”
Christian Lanng, chief executive of Tradeshift, added: “Paper invoicing is a cumbersome, completely-outdated process. When the supplier network is as big as the NHS’s, that equates to an enormous amount of unnecessary work and wasted time. The platform – which is free and always will be to suppliers – will enable NHS SBS to optimise processes, increase control and add value right across the supply chain.
Other public sector organisations should look to NHS SBS as a great example of what can be done to improve processes when you embrace innovation and modern approaches to business
“Other public sector organisations should look to NHS SBS as a great example of what can be done to improve processes when you embrace innovation and modern approaches to business. We’re delighted that NHS SBS will be working with Tradeshift to revolutionise its payments process, and we’re proud that our platform will play a major role in saving public sector money.”
By providing a free online invoicing system to growing businesses and suppliers, Tradeshift has already connected 500,000 businesses on its platform. It not only simplifies the e-Invoicing process for suppliers of NHS SBS clients, but also allows integration of many other financial processes. As well as eliminating the time taken to manually process payments, it crucially joins up all suppliers around one portal. This easy-to-access portal will become a powerful networking and information resource for suppliers of NHS SBS clients, allowing them to communicate, transact, explore, educate and discover new and exciting ways to do business with each other.
