The Crown Commercial Service (CCS), the UK’s largest public procurement organisation, is working in partnership with NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) to provide Atamis software licences to support health sector buyers, procurement teams, data analysts, and commercial teams to adopt the e-commerce system.

Following the launch of the NHS Central Commercial Function (CCF), at Public Board on 7th July, the rollout of Atamis will provide greater insight into procurement value, business intelligence and visibility of the NHS commercial landscape, which will help us deliver wide-ranging commercial benefits and opportunities.

Over 90 health and NHS organisations have already successfully to Atamis. CCS is to provide DHSC with around £12.8m funding – £4.2m over each of the next three years. DHSC will invest this in the Atamis software and system, and data practitioners who will “manage the service and identify commercial opportunities that can drive efficiency and supply chain resilience”.

By bringing all health family organisations together on to one e-commerce system, the system will unlock significant benefits for everyone, including:

• Supporting collaboration and the development of the ICS model of procurement by working on a single system across 42 ICSs.
• Providing better quality live information for procurement and finance teams to enable data-driven commercial insights, decisions and activities.
• Reducing administration costs through automated data collection and reporting and by removing the need to train multiple users across different systems.
• Enabling easier adoption of changes to procurement regulation and policy that can be made once for the whole Atamis system.
• Making it easier for suppliers, especially SMEs, to do business with us as they will only need to interact with one system.
• Embedding our sustainability requirements, so that sustainability and procurement teams can access supplier emission data.
• Improving visibility across the system, which will give the NHS opportunities to leverage its buying power.
• Increasing transparency and sharing of data to help drive resilience and value for money for patients and the taxpayer.

Further info on the wider accessibility of Atamis can be found on the CCS’s page.