The Problem
The income team needs to produce monthly income and activity data in a timely manner for internal and external stakeholders because otherwise there would be serious repercussions regarding income recovery and financial sustainability.
The Challenge
How might we improve the monthly processing routine so that we can deliver the required information in accordance with Trust expectations and contractual agreements with commissioners or, even exceed those expectations, in the most efficient way?
The Outputs
The tangible products that came from our innovation were:
- a robust system/ process that has the potential to be executed by any member of the team without any great depth of or prior T-SQL knowledge
- a fully auditable process. Each stage of the process is documented and can be interrogated where required, should the need arise
- an automated end-to-end process which can be scheduled to run as and when desired, in particular outside of core office hours when there is generally less traffic on the network.
The Outcomes
The benefits to the individual/ team/ organisation/ system experienced as a result of the innovation were:
- external reports being distributed to commissioners earlier
- internal reports distributed earlier resulting in more time being available to analyse the results prior to month end
- overall efficiency increased by a minimum of 50%, freeing up staff time to focus on more value-added work streams.