NHS Shared Business Services migrates financial systems to Oracle Fusion Cloud
NHS SBS leveraged Oracle Fusion Applications to design and build a new finance and procurement platform for the National Health Service in England.
United Kingdom | Government
“Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications and OCI have helped us meet our mission of releasing time back to care. By standardizing and scaling our finance platform, we’re creating headroom to support the NHS where it matters most.”
NHS Shared Business Services (NHS SBS), a leading provider of corporate services across the English National Health Service (NHS), is using Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications to help the NHS save money, enhance quality, and deliver better patient care. With Oracle Fusion Applications, NHS SBS has standardized processes within an AI-powered finance suite to help increase efficiency, improve controls, expand insights, and enhance decision-making.
After a decade of delivering the original finance service, NHS SBS harnessed its unique knowledge to design and build the new finance and procurement platform—one of the country’s most critical public service infrastructures. As part of this process, NHS SBS leveraged Oracle Fusion Applications to help enhance its financial operations.
Why NHS chose Oracle
NHS Shared Business Services wanted to redesign the end-to-end finance system used by NHS organizations in England. This involved standardizing and rationalizing some 450 individual finance applications and processes without losing control or compromising security. The organization also sought to increase efficiency to enable the NHS to redirect savings to frontline care. It selected Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Oracle Enterprise Performance Management running on Oracle UK Sovereign Cloud—a dedicated region cloud that provides access to all Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services while supporting national infrastructure and UK data requirements. Oracle ERP lets the NHS simplify and automate its accounts payable and receivable, cash management, invoice processing, debt recovery, and purchasing processes, while Oracle Enterprise Performance Management enables more detailed operational planning and forecasting. Oracle updates both sets of cloud applications quarterly, delivering the latest capabilities.
NHS Shared Business Services selected Oracle because of its deep understanding of the health sector, its strong existing relationship with the NHS, and its commitment to supporting a shared services model tailored to NHS requirements. Oracle’s healthcare credentials have been strengthened through its acquisition of Cerner in 2021 and the ongoing growth of Oracle Health. Additionally, Oracle’s proven ability to run critical public sector workloads, its continuous integration of AI features into its applications, and its powerful data analytics capabilities also differentiated it from competitors.
Results
Every year, hundreds of billions of pounds flow around England’s National Health Service, ensuring that patients receive the care they need when they need it. The platform used to process this is critical national infrastructure—as essential to the country as the banking system or air traffic control.
Running Oracle’s ERP and EPM applications on Oracle UK Sovereign Cloud enables NHS Shared Business Services to comply with regulations for critical national infrastructure regarding security posture and data center location. Additionally, Oracle Integration Cloud and Oracle Analytics Cloud bring together disaggregated data from dozens of systems to be exchanged securely in Oracle Autonomous AI Lakehouse. The result is a more scalable platform that supports financial best practices and consistent ways of working across regions and integrated care systems.
Already, NHS SBS has standardized and automated financial operations to process 7.1 million invoices, recover £7.4 billion in debt, and process £355 billion in NHS transactions per year. Oracle ERP creates the conditions for the NHS to increase productivity, reduce costs, and improve controls, while Oracle Enterprise Performance Management helps organizations get better insights to enable more detailed operational planning and forecasting and improve decision-making.
NHS Shared Business Services is also using some of the built-in AI capabilities of these applications with the goal of reducing repetitive work and giving staff more time to think, plan, and support frontline services.
Partners
Soprasteria – Technical consultancy and SaaS management
Mastek – Technical consultancy supporting process design
Project Eidos – Data migration consultancy
About the company
NHS SBS is a unique private/public organization specializing in HR, finance, and procurement. Delivering advisory, implementation, and managed services, the organization supports NHS clients through the full lifecycle of corporate shared service transformation.
Video: NHS Shared Business Services Provides Better Insights to Clinicians on OCI (2:04)