Why we need a new digital commerce platform

As part of our vision to be easier to work with, we’ve set up a digital commerce programme to provide a new digital platform and interface, encompassing the online catalogue, to NHS trusts across England. The new digital commerce suite will make it much easier for customers to search for and order products, improving overall operational performance and effectiveness. It will support mobile, as well as desktop access.

We know customers spend over 35,000 hours a month in total accessing our online catalogue and ordering system and their experience is not as good as it could be. People tell us they spend too much time searching for and ordering products, it’s not easy for them to find what they are looking for and the quality of information is often poor.

And each year £2.3 billion of orders are processed via catalogue solutions that are no longer able to adapt to meet the needs of the NHS. To address these issues and to deliver an improved way of doing business with us, we’re rolling out the new digital commerce platform and catalogue in phases to NHS trusts across England over a two-year period starting from spring 2024.

How will trusts be supported through the migration process?

We are developing a change management programme to support trusts as they migrate over to the new platform. We are working directly with trust users to identify the changes that will be required to operational processes and procedures, performing training needs analysis to jointly propose a business readiness plan to ensure a smooth transition. The readiness plan may be subtly different trust by trust but where possible we will aim for consistency in ways of working across trusts.

How will you ensure any disruption to NHS operations is minimised throughout the transition?

Whilst the customer transition and migration plan is still being worked upon, the programme will initially work with the pilot trusts to ensure a robust plan is in place for minimising any disruption, taking into consideration NHS business as usual operations. The learning from the initial delivery of the platform to the pilot trusts, alongside the plan will then be used to approach the migration for all other trusts. We will have a dedicated team on hand to support trusts in the early days post cutover to ensure any questions / challenges are addressed promptly.