The Customer
Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) is one of the largest acute NHS trusts in the UK, employing more than 28,000 staff and delivering hospital and community services across Greater Manchester and beyond.
The Challenge
Like many NHS organisations, MFT is operating in an environment of increasing financial pressure, rising demand and growing expectations around efficiency, governance and productivity.
The trust wanted to:
• Modernise and standardise finance processes
• Reduce unnecessary complexity and historic customisation
• Improve reporting and operational visibility
• Increase automation across finance workflows
• Support collaboration across Greater Manchester trusts
• Create a scalable platform capable of supporting future growth and transformation
• Reduce duplication and improve consistency across organisations
MFT had used previous versions of Integra successfully for many years. However, over time, the system had become heavily customised as organisational requirements evolved. The trust recognised this had gradually moved processes away from standard best practice approaches and created additional complexity across the organisation.
At the same time, the organisation needed a finance platform capable of handling extremely large volumes of financial and operational data while supporting future automation, reporting and system-wide collaboration.
Simon explained:
“We're the largest NHS trust in the country. And with that comes a lot of issues, particularly with scale.”
Building a Standardised Shared Platform
MFT worked closely with other Greater Manchester trusts to redesign finance processes and build a more standardised approach using the latest version of Integra Finance.
Rather than replicating historic processes, the trusts undertook extensive co-production workshops to review finance workflows, reporting structures and system configuration from the ground up. The aim was to create a shared, scalable platform capable of supporting multiple NHS organisations operating in a more consistent and collaborative way.
This standardised approach has significantly reduced duplication across reporting and administration, while enabling trusts to operate from shared reporting templates and consistent data structures across the wider Greater Manchester system.
For example, organisations now operate from a single version of reports such as aged creditor and aged debt reporting, helping improve consistency, governance and operational efficiency across trusts.
Ed explained:
“What was really exciting is it wasn't the MFT version of the processes.
“It was what's best practice, what do MFT want, what do Bolton want?”
The shared platform approach is also helping trusts share best practice more effectively and reduce the overhead associated with managing multiple localised system variations.
Fresh Implementation and System Redesign
MFT implemented Integra Finance through a completely fresh implementation approach.
Rather than carrying forward years of historic configuration and processes, the trust rebuilt the system from the ground up. Existing supplier and customer databases were cleansed and migrated, while much of the wider system configuration and reference data was redesigned.
This enabled the organisation to review processes in detail, remove unnecessary historic complexity and establish a stronger long-term foundation for finance transformation and future scalability.
The move to a clean, standardised implementation also means future upgrades, developments and automation can now be rolled out more consistently and efficiently across the wider Greater Manchester platform.
Automation and Digital Transformation
MFT has taken a highly forward-thinking approach to digital transformation within finance, including significant investment in automation and data-driven processes.
The organisation already uses robotic process automation (RPA) across multiple finance functions, including invoice registration, housekeeping tasks, data manipulation and journal processing.
The trust is also focused on increasing the amount of operational and financial data held within Integra Finance to improve reporting, operational insight and decision making.
One of the major advantages of the standardised approach is the ability to rapidly deploy improvements, automation and new functionality across the wider Greater Manchester platform. Because trusts are operating from a shared implementation, developments can be rolled out consistently across organisations without lengthy redevelopment or reconfiguration work.
MFT believes even relatively small workflow automations can create significant cumulative time savings when deployed across a very large user base spanning multiple NHS organisations.
The organisation is also developing automated end-user management functionality within the platform, allowing managers to update user accounts directly within the system using electronic approvals and fully auditable workflows.
MFT believes this will significantly reduce administration while strengthening governance, auditability and user management controls across the wider Greater Manchester platform.
Improved Reporting and Operational Visibility
The trust has also seen improvements in reporting performance and operational visibility across finance functions.
Managers are now able to access financial and operational data more quickly and consistently through reporting tools, while the organisation says system performance has remained strong despite the scale and volume of data being processed.
The combination of standardised processes, automation and the latest version of Integra Finance is already delivering operational benefits across reporting, workflow efficiency and administration. MFT has also highlighted strong system performance despite operating at one of the largest scales in the NHS and processing extremely large datasets.
Ed explained:
“Being able to really dive into the data and the reports that we've built through Integra are really enabling managers to be able to get to the information quickly.”
Developing the Greater Manchester Shared Service
One of the most significant outcomes of the programme has been the development of the ‘B Finance’ shared service concept across Greater Manchester NHS organisations.
The shared service model is helping bring together specialist finance systems expertise, improve resilience within teams and reduce duplication across organisations.
This collaborative approach is particularly valuable within the NHS, where specialist finance systems expertise can be difficult to recruit and retain. By pooling expertise and standardising processes, the Greater Manchester trusts are creating a more resilient and scalable operating model capable of supporting future growth and transformation.
The Outcome
By combining standardised finance processes, shared reporting structures, automation and collaborative development, MFT and its Greater Manchester partners are creating one of the largest shared NHS finance platforms in England.
The programme is helping organisations reduce duplication, strengthen governance, improve operational visibility and create a more scalable finance infrastructure capable of supporting future NHS transformation and productivity requirements.
MFT believes the shared platform approach will continue to deliver long-term efficiencies across finance operations while enabling faster adoption of automation, reporting enhancements and future digital innovation across the wider Greater Manchester healthcare system.
