Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust hosts a procurement shared service known as SmartTogether, which supports procurement activity for five organisations: Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust, Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, and South London and Maudsley NHS Trust.

David Lawson, Chief Procurement Officer for SmartTogether, has spent 18 years at Guy’s & St Thomas’ and describes it as an organisation where “there’s always interesting things happening,” something he says has kept him there for nearly two decades. The shared service supports five hospitals in total, each with its own health cost improvement plan, requiring procurement insight that can flex across different organisational and clinical priorities.

The challenge
Supporting multiple organisations means maintaining a constant pipeline of cost improvement initiatives, while also identifying price variation both within the group and across the wider NHS.

Lawson explained that NEC AdviseInc’s price benchmarking capability helps support this pipeline by identifying price variation between the different hospitals supported by SmartTogether. He pointed in particular to the opportunity created by supporting both Great Ormond Street Hospital and the Evelina London Children’s Hospital within Guy’s & St Thomas’, noting that this “gives us a huge opportunity to look at product pricing across two large specialist paediatric hospitals within the same group.” The tool also enables variation to be identified between other hospitals across the UK.

Prior to using NEC AdviseInc, the team had relied on an alternative price benchmarking tool, but Lawson said his team “found it difficult to navigate, so they didn’t use it as much,” limiting its value in day‑to‑day procurement activity.

The solution
Lawson described NEC AdviseInc as “well thought of in terms of being proactive, responsive and wanting to do the best for the procurement team,” which he saw as a real positive from the outset.

A major benefit of the price benchmarking tool was usability. Built on Qlik, the platform was “more intuitive to use,” Lawson explained, and the fact it was user‑friendly meant the team could get “real value from it.” As a result, the sourcing team now uses the tool daily as a reference point for cost improvement plan development, analysis and validation. “It’s now part of business as usual,” he said.

Lawson also highlighted a key limitation of the previous benchmarking solution: it only referenced purchase order data. That meant other transactions were excluded, leaving gaps in visibility. NEC AdviseInc addressed this through its Procurement Dashboard (PD), which incorporates invoice data as well. Lawson said this had proven beneficial, as it provides “a complete overview of your non‑pay spend.”

The benefits
In addition to analytical use, Lawson also relies on NEC AdviseInc’s tools for reporting. He regularly uses them when presenting at internal committees or briefing clinical teams, helping to provide a clear overview of non‑pay spend. From a presentation perspective, Lawson said that being able to show the procurement team has access to an analytical tool that provides this level of insight “gives us credibility” and supports discussion around opportunities.

One example of the impact of this insight came when SmartTogether was asked to support Great Ormond Street Hospital. Using NEC AdviseInc’s price benchmarking tool, the team quickly identified that the orthopaedic team was paying double the price for a specific spinal product compared with another orthopaedic centre elsewhere in the country, even though that organisation was buying less of the product.

Lawson explained that this insight was presented to finance and the Medical Director to highlight the savings opportunity. The team was then able to negotiate a much lower price with the supplier, delivering savings of around £220,000, representing a 50% reduction for Great Ormond Street Hospital.

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