Background & Challenge
After a challenging year where the Covid-19 pandemic impacted activities and financials, our client launched an ambitious strategic initiative focused on becoming more efficient, concentrating on growth and delivering sustainable value for consumers and doctors.
The pandemic exposed an over-reliance on a ‘single’ income source. All elective activity (e.g. joint replacements, cataracts), the primary income source, was halted overnight, but a high fixed cost base remained. As a response, Curzon Consulting was engaged to design and deliver a Procurement Transformation Programme.
Overall Approach
Over nine months, we took a pragmatic, agile and “together” approach to accelerate benefit delivery, particularly in high spend / high complex clinical spend categories
- Conducted a full review and defined a new procurement organisation aimed at maximising value to the business
- Conducted a review of the external spending and identified cost savings opportunities within complex medical categories
- Implemented a full strategic programme that delivered multi-million £ cost savings to the business
Our Solution
1 FULL PROCUREMENT ORGANISATION REVIEW
We assessed the existing procurement organisation against eight dimensions and highlighted several data-driven insights
- Quantitatively and qualitatively assessed the procurement team, conducted time analysis, salary benchmark & reviewed performance
- Business partnering and perceived value: Interviewed key business stakeholders across all divisions
- Assessed procurement influence across all spending areas
- Defined and costed new (to-be) procurement organisation
Our Results
- A complete procurement maturity assessment highlighting strengths and weaknesses of the current procurement organisation
- A new procurement organisation was designed, profiled and costed.
- A procurement organisation designed to maximise value to the business and stakeholders
2 FULL EXTERNAL EXPENDITURE OPPORTUNITY ASSESSMENT
We conducted a full opportunity assessment on Ramsay’s external expenditure to define adequate sourcing strategies and identify cost savings opportunities
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- Cleansed, categorised and analysed spend data; Providing full spend transparency.
- Conducted category deep dive for each key medical category, assessed current category management and supplier management
- Defined adequate sourcing strategy, identified opportunities and sourcing levers
- Identified and quantified savings potential via internal and external benchmarking
Our Results
- Category strategy for all key medical categories
- Multi-million cost saving opportunities identified
- Prioritised sourcing plan with saving targets by spend categories
- High level 3-year business plan
3 THE IMPLEMENTATION
We implemented procurement transformation and a cost reduction program
- Our methodology was specifically adapted to address demand-side cost optimisation levers. Whilst we addressed a range of spend categories and redesigned the PO, we delivered sizeable benefits in difficult clinical areas such as Orthopaedics.
- A key benefit in orthopaedics came from ensuring the surgeon selected the appropriate implant system (metal or ceramic) to match the patient’s profile (e.g. age, gender).
- Our analysis showed surgeons implanted costly ceramic hip systems in a high percentage of older NHS patients. With fixed NHS reimbursement every incremental switch impacted the bottom line.
- Our insights directly influenced the Orthopaedic Steering Group’s new policy which required surgeons to utilise lower-cost metal hip systems in older NHS patients.
- Fundamentally, a key part of the relationship was to ensure recommendations on cost improvements would not compromise clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction.
Our Results
- Delivered £multi-millions in incremental savings and a new procurement organisation
- Engaged with all key medical stakeholders and instilled a cost-consciousness culture
- Ramsay Health Care UK will benefit from the savings over multiple years
“Curzon helped us obtain the confidence and operational ‘can-do’ to drive incremental savings sooner than we could have expected, and then to push on to best practice performance.
Their skill was in balancing pace of change and the results imperative with the need to take the organisation with them on the journey.
A key achievement was building the necessary collaboration between the many functions that needed to act together to drive benefits in complex clinical spend categories.
Curzon’s strong analytical expertise, and ability help us to take a critical view on the “art of the possible” and bring the team along on the journey to demonstrate benefits delivery was a critical success factor.
The result was a tangible and ongoing commercial win, and a new Procurement Organisation to drive cost leadership, profitability and sustainability going forward”
