CPP Uses Automation to Help Reduce NHS Procurement Costs with Alteryx

This challenge led CPP to Alteryx, which the team’s business analysts quickly put to work.

“For each trust, there’s an individual spreadsheet for every category of equipment,” says Jemma Brace, a lead data and insights analyst at the Collaborative Procurement Partnership. “Within that file, there’s an individual sheet for each sub-category. That’s thousands of datasets.”

CPP 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, changing the word ‘pack’ to the code ‘PK’, for example — 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. Rather than simply delete products that are no longer available, the flow adds an ‘obsolete’ tag, which means the data is ignored by benchmarks but retained for auditing.

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.

Helen Lisle
Managing Director
Collaborative Procurement Partnership

Through automation, CPP is helping its trusts 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 CPP team is now looking at automating other data feeds beyond the pricing spreadsheets. And with the success of its Alteryx Designer deployment, CPP is also migrating to Alteryx Server. This will help create a complete automated ecosystem, allowing its analysts to focus on saving the NHS even more on its procurement costs.

“Our investment in Alteryx has been rewarded in a very short time,” says Helen Lisle, managing director of the Collaborative Procurement Partnership. “Alteryx is central to our ongoing technology development road map, and the transformation of CPP services to NHS Supply Chain.”