Why submitting your spend (AP/PO) data gives you the advantage

If you don’t currently upload your Accounts Payable (AP) and Purchase Order (PO) data on to my.lpp, you’re missing out on a valuable tool that gives you direction and insights on your procurement activity. These insights are provided free as part of your membership.

Available at your fingertips, you can access user-friendly dashboards that provide excellent visibility on your spend at either trust or ICB level. The visual reports help you to identify savings opportunities, prioritise spend and inform strategic decision-making. When you send us your data, working with Predict X – a spend analytics platform – we validate, cleanse and enrich the information and make it available to you at the press of a button.

Utilising Predict X to manage your procurement activities effectively

NHS LPP has partnered with Predict X since 2013 to provide a procurement analytics platform that provides members with a centralised and granular view of their spend at both trust and ICB level. Each trust is able to - and should - submit their AP and PO data in their own format which Predict X then maps on to a master data table for benchmarking and reporting. This reduces the effort required by the member trust, as there is no need to transform their data on to a standard template. The data is validated, cleansed, enriched and then made available to members on interactive-web based dashboards on the Predict X portal. The data is not passed or sold on to any organisations outside of the NHS.

To assist your team by removing the requirement to physically upload the data through a portal, Predict X can support you by receiving your data through Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). This method of submitting data comes with additional security benefits whilst your data is being transferred to the platform.
If you are able to automate the generation of files that you submit, this method allows for the files to be sent automatically to them. Reducing the requirement of this action by a member of your team.

Relaunched spend analytics portal – have you logged in to the new Predict X Hollywood portal?

Predict X has recently launched its new ‘Hollywood’ portal which provides significant enhancements in both speed and functionality compared to the old platform and includes ICB-level reporting out of the box. The new platform also provides features such as ‘PX Grid’ and ‘Studio mode’ that allow users to customise their own dashboards and create ad-hoc analytics which they can share with their peers without having to download the data into separate tools.

To support you, our members we are developing the analytics package to assist with some operational procurement requirements which we hope to be releasing in the near future.

Predict X is continually enhancing the platform based on user feedback, so we encourage members to try it out and let us know of any suggestions that would make the tool more useful.

Investing in resources and new technology to improve analytical capability for you

In addition to the standard Predict X dashboards, NHS LPP’s Business Intelligence team can provide further spend and opportunity analysis, and bespoke reports using data from other NHS data sets in addition to Predict X data. We are working with Predict X to implement a data feed into our own data warehouse which will facilitate cross referencing with other data sets and the automation and refreshing of our bespoke reports. We have invested heavily in both resources and state-of-the-art technology such as the Power BI Premium platform to improve our analytical capability.

We are working on several initiatives to further enrich the data with details such as SME categorisation and supplier locality that will – for example – facilitate the creation of the local spend dashboard requested by the mayor’s office. The key to the success of this particular project will not only be for all members to upload their data regularly to Predict X but also to include supplier address details which are currently optional. The address details are needed for the reliable identification of a supplier on the Dun & Bradstreet database which will in turn provide the SME status.

For further details, please email BusinessIntelligence@lpp.nhs.uk

Or for support queries with the Predict Xplatform get in touch at lpp-support@predictx.com.