Transform NHS Estates with digital process automation

Paul Stone00:00

My name is Paul Stone, I work for a company called FlowForma, and today I'm going to talk about transforming NHS Estates with digital process automation, which gives you increased visibility, improves your productivity and improves the efficiency of your operations. We have a short amount of time, so I'll go through the slides quickly and focus on the main points.

Paul Stone00:24

First, a little about FlowForma. It's a digital process automation and work management system: it drives processes through your organization to achieve your business goals, like managing your assets. It's quite unique in the marketplace because it lets you digitize any process you have today. If a process runs on paper or a spreadsheet, you can digitize it with FlowForma and start gaining all the advantages.

Paul Stone00:56

We're also different because you digitize your own processes. You're not dependent on an IT provider; you can build the processes yourself, and in the demonstration later I'll show you how easy that is.

Paul Stone01:12

We've been awarded a place on the NHS London Procurement Partnership, based on the value we're providing to the NHS, and I'll talk about some case studies today that demonstrate that value. We're also an approved vendor for the NHS shared tenancy, and if you have your own Microsoft 365 environment, we can operate on top of that as well.

Paul Stone01:44

Because of the way we approach process automation, we've been internationally recognized. We have lots of clients in the NHS in the UK, and clients around the world, such as the Department of Health in the State of Utah in the US. We have over 300,000 users across the globe using FlowForma to digitize their processes, make themselves more efficient and capture more data for analytics.

Paul Stone02:14

So what kinds of benefits can FlowForma bring to NHS Estates? We cover many scenarios within NHS Estates operations. It can be used to manage stock, carry out fire safety checks and a number of other safety-related processes, and manage equipment: checking equipment in and out, and monitoring it to make sure it's working to standard.

Paul Stone02:54

All of these processes can be digitized with FlowForma. The big difference against other systems is that they can be tailored to the specific needs of your hospital and the resources that operate within it, so each process runs as efficiently as possible in your environment.

Paul Stone03:10

The system operates on top of Microsoft 365, or N365, and people can access it at their desk or on mobile devices: our app runs on Android and iOS. It's very well suited to managing teams, because the whole idea is that work passes from one person in the organization to the next until it's done, gathering data all along the way.

Paul Stone03:54

First, one of our case studies: Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Here's a quote from the IT team at the Trust, saying the efficiency and accuracy of the data they can extract using FlowForma processes has been a game changer.

Paul Stone04:15

In the past, processes ran on paper and email, so the data captured wasn't available for analytics at all. Implementing FlowForma captured all that information and made it available for analysis. It also improved productivity by driving processes forward and automating tasks, so people had less work to do and could reach their goal faster and more efficiently.

Paul Stone04:51

Blackpool has digitized over 30 processes, and a lot of them focus on equipment maintenance and safety management: checking equipment in and out, allocating equipment to resources, managing faults and incidents relating to equipment, and regular spot checks to make sure equipment performs to standard.

Paul Stone05:27

Overall, this created a significant reduction in processing time, because information was collected accurately at the point the check was carried out. The person on site viewing the equipment could record the details on a mobile device or a form. And all the activity from everyone carrying out maintenance around the hospital was tracked and recorded, including the performance of the equipment, so it could be reported on.

Paul Stone06:19

Let's look at the system. You typically kick off a process by clicking a link, and you access the system through a dashboard where you can see all your processes, where they are right now, and who's got the ball. When you go into a task, the system presents only the information you need to enter at that point, unlike a paper form on an A4 page where you have to fill in lots of detail.

Paul Stone07:08

This is a short fire safety check. Across the top is a series of steps carried out by different people: the person doing the check sees the first step, the fire warden assigns follow-up actions, and the actions can be owned by different people depending on what they are.

Paul Stone07:38

In the first step, I record the check. For a question like whether all corridors and fire escape routes are free of rubbish and obstructions, I can say no, then upload a document or an image. On a mobile device it would let me take a photo with the camera, and I can annotate the image to point out the issue and add comments. When everything else is fine, I submit and allocate the follow-up action, either to myself or to somebody else in the organization.

Paul Stone08:46

Now I'm on the next step, assigning actions. There was only one issue, so the system ignored everything else, though it keeps a full record of what the person who submitted the report recorded. As the fire warden, I see just the issues I have to act on, and I decide who's going to deal with this one. I type in the person's name, the system recognizes the user, and when I submit, the process moves on to the action owner to go and remove that rubbish.

Paul Stone09:52

To recap: you have a series of steps executed through the organization, different people are doing different things, and the system manages that. It also runs automatic actions in the background: handling the photos, managing the actions, sending emails to remind people to do things, and generating documentation, so you have a documented record of everything. And at each step, each person sees a focused view of the information they need to do the job right now.

Paul Stone10:37

The system also gives you metrics on all this activity, so you can quickly see which processes are running late and which are on time. Drilling in, you can see which steps are causing a bottleneck because they run late over half the time. The system records the full audit trail, so you know where a process is at any point, who it's assigned to and when it was last updated, and you can analyze issues in real time and act on them. That's very useful if you're managing lots of staff working across the hospital.

Paul Stone11:35

FlowForma also provides dashboard tools for all the information you capture in the workflows. With tools like Microsoft Power BI, you can analyze, for example, how many times a particular fire safety check failed, by type. If rubbish in corridors comes up frequently, you might update your policies and controls to address it.

Paul Stone12:20

You can see not just where processes are right now but how they've performed in the past, so you can gradually improve them. You can quickly edit a process to add new steps, then compare how it ran before and after the change. Our flexible no-code editor makes those changes quick and easy. With that, I'll pass back to Matthew for some questions.

Matthew13:00

Thank you, Paul. I'm going to run the poll on screen, and then take some questions. How long does it take to digitize a process with FlowForma?

Paul Stone13:18

It's designed to be very quick, because it's designed for business users to build themselves, and business users don't have much time. The fire safety check I showed you today took three hours to build. If you went to an IT supplier, it would take a lot longer. We also have a very good onboarding program to get you up to speed as quickly as possible, so you can take control and do things yourself.

Matthew13:45

What are the technical requirements for using FlowForma?

Paul Stone13:51

The only technical requirement is that it runs on Microsoft 365, or in the case of the NHS, N365. Once you have that in place, you already have the infrastructure to run the system, and it's already pre-approved, so it's very easy to install and get up and running, with our onboarding program to help.

Matthew14:17

Our processes often need changes. Could we make these changes in-house with FlowForma?

Paul Stone14:27

Absolutely. In an ideal world, the people who own the processes in the hospital build the systems themselves, so you move away from IT change controls and take ownership. The IT department benefits too: at Blackpool NHS, the IT department mainly configures the flows, and they find it really beneficial because it's so quick compared with any other tool out there.

Matthew15:13

Could I enable my suppliers to take part in processes digitized with FlowForma?

Paul Stone15:22

Yes. You can allocate steps in a process to different people in your organization, and a feature called Engage lets you externalize the process too, so an external person like a supplier can fill in a supplier application, which is then processed internally in your organization.

Matthew15:42

Thank you very much, Paul. Delegates can go to the handouts PDF for more information from FlowForma and follow up with Paul after the conference. Hopefully we'll see you at an in-person event next year.