East of England Commercial Support Unit

A.T. Kearney was engaged by 14 healthcare commissioning organizations in the East of England to design a commercial support unit that would, amongst other roles, procure and manage central analytic and data solutions for each organization, as well as for the provider agencies (e.g., hospitals, clinics) in the region.

Challenge
A.T. Kearney’s role was to create a dynamic procurement and commercial support organization that would respond effectively to customers’ and sponsors’ needs.

In doing so, it was clear that each customer had differing requirements and priorities, driven by its specific locality and population’s needs. However, at the same time, standardization and commonality were paramount to ensuring economies of scale in both purchasing and operations. This standardization was also essential to ensure effective benchmarking and near-real-time performance management where possible.

Approach
This conflict in requirements – local and flexible versus standardized and aggregated – required careful consideration and stakeholder alignment to ensure the effective procurement of systems to support all customers’ needs.

Alignment was achieved through a rapid consultation and engagement exercise to first document local needs and then to categorize these requirements to illustrate the disperse commonality between each. The exercise demonstrated the benefits of enhancing the scope to ensure local needs could be delivered by standardized solutions.

Results
The result was a procurement strategy built on “output-based” specifications that allowed the customer to be confident in the end product, as well as provide potential suppliers opportunity to adapt and flex their solutions with confidence.

Following extensive market soundings, the procurement strategy “bundled” services to allow competition between a wide range of suppliers with varying capability, as well as encouraging consolidation of solutions where feasible.