The NHS Electronic Staff Record solution (ESR) is a single workforce management tool for the NHS: offering an ‘end to end’ workforce management solution during NHS employment. It provides salary payments and other pay-related remuneration to 1.8 million employees, circa 5% of the working population in England and Wales. We were commissioned to provide specialist business case expertise in supporting the production of an Outline Business Case (OBC) for the reprocurement of the service.
Following the approval of the services’ Strategic Outline Case (SOC) by HM Treasury, the project team embarked on a series of market engagement events with potential suppliers. This, coupled with supply chain issues arising from the COVID pandemic, resulted in the need to rapidly change the team’s procurement approach. Working collaboratively as part of the ESR team and having reviewed the SOC and clarified the revised approach we managed the co-production of the OBC by:
Our experience in producing major business cases coupled with the client team’s ESR domain expertise enabled the production of the OBC within only 7 weeks. The approval process was commenced at this point and the OBC duly received full approval from HM Treasury. The project team have subsequently enacted the revised approach securing the ongoing delivery of the ESR service whilst in parallel investigating how future service provision should be undertaken.