Hospital to save £4m with e-procurement

St Mary's NHS Trust aims to save £4m over the next five years after becoming the first hospital to sign up for a new government-sponsored online marketplace.

It is the first trust out of a consortium of 17 to connect to its suppliers via the OGCbuying.solutions Zanzibar Managed Service, an online procurement marketplace.

Mansel Chamberlain, procurement director of the Northwest London NHS Procurement Confederation, said that with the 17 trusts in the group spending almost £1bn per year on supplies, and the potential for savings "is enormous".

He said five of the largest trusts - accounting for more than 50 per cent of that expenditure - are now committed to rolling out Zanzibar, which he said will save St Mary's alone "more than £4m over the next five years".

Zanzibar is a hosted procurement system tailored to meet the needs of the UK public sector. It provides a data warehouse, a single point of access to the government marketplace for both buyers and suppliers, and access to hosted supplier catalogues as well as handling non-catalogue transactions.

It also offers integration facilities to allow public sector organisations to integrate their existing e-procurement, finance and sales order systems with Zanzibar.

The service is available to all public sector organisations in England, Northern Ireland and Wales. The St Mary's e-procurement project went live at the end of June, and was implemented by CedarOpenAccounts, OGCbuying.solutions and PA Shared Services.