North of England Commissioning Support (NECS)

Overview

An organisation that delivers administrative and healthcare services on behalf of hospitals and healthcare providers in the United Kingdom is using the K2 process automation platform to significantly improve the efficiency of its administrative processes. It has reduced the time required for one key process by 73% and expects to achieve cost savings of over £200,000 when all its planned new K2 processes are rolled out.

Benefits

• £45,000 saved annually with automated travel processes
• 73% time saving in travel booking process
• £100,000 predicted saving from automated administrative processes
• £60,000 predicted saving from new Freedom of Information Request process

Company Profile

North of England Commissioning Support (NECS) works across the UK to support health and social care customers in meeting strategic and operational challenges, to improve outcomes and increase efficiency.

CHALLENGE

Hospitals, clinical commissioning groups and GP practices are among the many NHS organisations that outsource services to NECS. To help deliver highly efficient, patient-centric services for these partners, NECS wanted to automate a large number of administrative processes, many of which were largely paper-based.

The organisation conducted thorough evaluations of several workflow solutions before selecting the K2 business process automation platform. “The K2 approach starts with the data and forms and then creates the workflow, which we found very logical,” says Andrew Robson, Business Process Automation Lead at NECS. “We could see straight away how the K2 approach would help us to take unnecessary steps out of our processes.”

He adds: “The K2 platform was also far less expensive than other solutions we considered and, as it was already approved on the UK Government’s G-Cloud Framework, we could acquire it easily without a protracted procurement process.”

SOLUTION

NECS implemented the K2 platform with some initial support and training from one of K2’s partners. It then set about transforming some of its most paper-intensive processes, while helping its 1,100 employees to adjust to the new ways of working with automated workflows.

Right from the outset, NECS realised significant efficiency gains from its use of the K2 platform. For example, NECS developed two fairly straightforward workflows for booking rail travel and hotel accommodation and estimates that users save, on average, 17 minutes each time they make a request using one of these workflows.

These time savings equate to substantial annual cost savings, as Robson explains. “In the past, our rail travel and accommodation request processes, used to take 23 minutes, whereas they now take just 6 minutes,” he says. “We have, on average, 2,500 rail and hotel booking requests a year from users so, taking into account average salaries, we estimate that K2 saves £45,000 a year on these two process automations alone.”

Following on from these successes, NECS is now developing additional process automations using the K2 platform, including solutions for Serious Incident Root Cause Analysis, Proposal Management and other support functions. “We estimate that by automating these administrative processes with K2, we can save a further £100,000 a year, from no longer having to review and return incomplete forms,” Robson says.

In addition, NECS is developing a K2-based process for Freedom of Information Requests, which it estimates will generate annual savings of £60,000.