NHS Wales expects to save £1m per year once it has gone live with document management solutions from software provider V1, as well as a range of e-trading solutions across the health service.
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NHS Wales operates as a shared service, and comprises seven health boards and three NHS trusts.
Its service manager, Said Shadi, who was in charge of the project, told Computing that the health service was looking to reduce the amount of manual entry of invoices and other issues associated with manually keying in information.
"The driver was to eliminate any need to manually key invoices into the system, so that front-line staff could be more productive doing other things," said Shadi.
In order to eliminate manual entries, the health service had to integrate its existing solutions with e-trading solutions.
"In 2000 we implemented an e-business suite from Oracle including ERP, finance and supply chain solutions. We've had a number of e-trading solutions in the past where we can send electronic purchase orders to suppliers and get electronic invoices back. On the whole they work, the problem was that not all suppliers are engaged in trying to send or receive electronic purchase orders," he said.
"The largest suppliers out there like Johnson & Johnson have [electronic] solutions and are happy to integrate into their back-office systems so it is end to end, but trying to integrate something into local suppliers' local solutions like fruit and veg shops for example, becomes next to impossible," he explained.
Shadi said that up to 600,000 supplier invoices per year were being processed electronically, leaving 600,000 invoices that were still being sent to NHS Wales by other means.
"We therefore had to look at alternative software solutions that could bridge the gap between our XML solution and manual invoice processing," he said.
This meant that e-trading platforms alone would not be enough to address NHS Wales' needs.
The health service looked at Oracle's Document Management, Brainware, Kofax Markview, Cannon and Readsoft.
"The offerings looked good on paper, but we looked at affordability and as we didn't have an endless pocket of money that could get a solution to work effectively [they did not fit our criteria]," he said.
NHS Wales was then introduced to V1's solution through Patech, a company which it had a managing service arrangement with.
"After looking at the solution, our goal was then to see the organisations that have actually implemented it, how they've implemented it and what the challenges are. This was not just the cost of implementation but what the total cost of ownership of that solution would be," Shadi said.
