NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership

The Customer

NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership (NWSSP) is a national body, established in 2011, to provide a wide range of professional, technical, and administrative services on behalf of all Health Boards and Trusts in NHS Wales. NWSSP supports frontline healthcare by delivering excellence in procurement, finance, legal services, workforce, and more.

In the last 12 months alone, NWSSP processed 3.4 million purchase orders, managing over £7.6 bn in spend, underscoring its critical role in enabling effective, efficient care across Wales.

Health Boards across Wales provide acute, community, and mental health services in complex environments. Each is progressing toward greater digital maturity, focusing on improving supply chain control, visibility, and efficiency.

The Challenge

A national challenge, a local start

NWSSP is leading the transformation of inventory practices across Welsh hospitals. In collaboration with Health Boards and technology partners AdviseInc, R2 Consulting and SxanPro, NWSSP piloted a digital-first stocktake model to modernise stock audits — replacing manual, labour-intensive counts with faster, scalable digital solutions.

The pilot aimed to solve a critical pre-implementation challenge: delivering an accurate, Finance-compliant year-end stock valuation in areas not yet live with full Inventory Management systems. These included high-pressure clinical environments where traditional audits were time-consuming, resource-heavy, and risked disruption to services.

With just a few weeks to deliver results, the pilot needed to meet immediate deadlines while also setting the foundation for national Scan for Safety ambitions.

An absolute game changer. Easy to use and quick. Saved a week of work. I have nothing but praise!

Why AdviseInc

Smarter tech, faster counts: A first of its kind partnership

This pilot marked the first use of SxanPro’s powerful supply chain technology in the UK, brought together with AdviseInc’s healthcare analytics and R2 Consulting’s Supply chain expertise. It introduced a streamlined model built around process design, mobile scanning, and automated data processing.

NWSSP and R2 trained field teams and worked with local Supply Chain staff to map store layouts and plan capture. Using SxanPro’s mobile app, teams recorded GTINs, expiry dates, and quantities at speed—working offline when needed – and scanned over 91% of items out of the box.

Captured data was processed through AdviseInc’s bespoke matching engine, aligning scans with catalogue and PO data to produce clear, finance-ready reports with insights into expiry risks, misclassification, and waste.

What’s Next? NWSSP and its partners are looking at further opportunities to adapt this model across Wales, strengthening compliance, improving inventory readiness, and continuing to unlock smarter ways of working across NHS Wales. AdviseInc, R2 Consulting, and SxanPro will continue to build their UK partnership, helping NHS organisations rapidly gain insight, enhance data quality, and drive smarter supply chain decisions.

The Solution

Real results on the balance sheet, ready for rollout

In just a few weeks, the pilot delivered significant benefits:

• Over 43,000 stock lines scanned
• £10 million in inventory valued
• 91% of items scanned out of the box
• 634 expired product lines detected and removed
• £1+ million additional stock identified vs previous counts

Finance leads noted the process helped meet external audit requirements even without a full Inventory Management system in place. One commented: “It allowed us to gather year-end data quickly, with less scope for human error. From a Finance perspective, it was a real success.”

Operational users also reported big time savings and smoother experiences: “The scanning was a game changer. It saved us more than a week’s work, was easy to use, and I hope we continue using it for future counts.”

Sxanpro enabled fast, accurate year-end stock counts, meeting audit needs with minimal human error

The Conclusion

Building for the future

The project proved that digital stock audits can be faster, more accurate, and significantly less disruptive. The team also discovered over 4,700 new GTINs, now being added to the national catalogue to improve future data accuracy.

This stocktake model is currently under consideration for broader use across NHS Wales. While there’s interest in running audits annually as a minimum — and more frequently where feasible — the approach is still being refined in collaboration with stakeholders. The proposed structure and reporting aim to support Scan for Safety by helping sites better understand stock levels and alignment with catalogue standards.

The impact wasn’t just technical — it built momentum.

“It wasn’t just about counting stock,” said an NWSSP Operational Delivery Partner. “It was about getting ready for system change. And now we have a repeatable, scalable model we can use again and again.”