Case Study: Birmingham & Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust Integra Centros

The Customer

Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust provides a comprehensive mental healthcare service for residents of Birmingham and Solihull, and a range of specialist mental health services to communities across the West Midlands and beyond. They provide a wide range of local and regional services and partnerships covering inpatient, community and specialist mental healthcare make it one of the most innovative and complex mental health foundation trusts in the country. The trust operates out of more than 40 sites and has 4500 staff working across these locations. They also have a subsidiary company called Summerhill Supplies Limited which the trust provides the finance functions for.

The Challenge

The Trust had two companies within Integra 2 and had a requirement to create two more companies in the future. The Trust wanted to add the two companies that were going to be bought in, but they need to be kept separate within the platform, with the option of merging them all together if required as part of reporting to NHS IE.

It was decided the easiest route was to go to a true multifunctional platform which is why migrating to the Integra Centros platform made the most sense. The Trust thought this would be a complicated process however as part of the project plan, the Project Manager set aside all the objectives, training dates and stressed the importance of getting buy in from the wider organisation.

Each area of the Trust did all their testing, signed it off and was checked. They did test as though there were working as normal through each process from the start to the finish, with the purchase Ledger manager actually going from order creation to doing a payment run.

The Outcome

Multicompany Functionality

The Trust see that the multi company functionality has made managing the system significantly easier now and into the future. Previously the two companies had been on separate environments which made it more difficult to manage both, now they are in the same environment but managed by the company id field which simplifies maintenance of the system as everything is controlled in one place.

Positive End User Feed Back

End users had a lot of positive feedback about how Centros looks around the new front end. Users like the new functionalities like the workspaces, reduced processing time as they are not having to click through lots of different screens. They like the fact that everything is in one place, they don’t have to keep moving around through menu screens to complete tasks.

Better upgrade process

The Trust believe the new upgrade process provides better delivery and reduced testing. Everything was updated at the same time rather than, which is much easier, and they know everything is updated to the latest version.

Archiving

As part of the upgrade the Trust undertook a house keeping project and archived some of the older data. This had not been done regularly and the Trust found that after the housekeeping things ran much faster, particularly Transactions and running reports.

Improved System Administration

Paul Jones the Head of Application Support and Systems Integration says ‘it’s a lot easier for an administrator now, In the new environment you make changes in one place and tick which companies you want them to apply to. It’s just done once, you don’t have to duplicate the work. So from a systems point of view, it’s a lot easier to use.’

The Trust have historically found creating customised reports complicated. The new customisable grids mean they can now get all the information they want because there’s options to add different columns and they can arrange a screen on an inquiry to how they like it to their specific requirements and save it like that. Individual users then have access to the screens when they log in.

Paul would recommend that people upgrade to the Centros platform. He says, ‘it has to be done and it’s better to do it sooner rather than later’.