At Lifecycle, we’re incredibly proud of our work to help our NHS clients save money and manage their contracts more effectively. But we couldn’t do that without the support of our fantastic team.

To shine a light on some of their great work, we caught up with Jan, one of our Senior Procurement Managers, to chat about his recent project with an acute hospital in the south east of England.

Tell me about the work you’ve been doing with the Trust. How did it all come about?
I had a request from the Trust’s IT department to help with an upcoming renewal of their Azure VMware licencing. Having already worked on a number of contracts across various departments at the Trust, IT wanted to see if we could help them too.

They were paying annually for their VMware licences, and the brief was to compliantly renew the contract for the best possible value with their incumbent supplier.

So how did you get started?
IT wasn’t a category of spend I had worked on much previously, so I was keen to understand the market for the Azure software. After investigating different suppliers, it became apparent that the price you paid for your licences could be dictated not just by the length and quantity of licences you purchased but also by the partner you bought through, as some had more preferential rates than others.

Once I understood this, I went back to the Trust and recommended that we test the market to ensure they were getting the best value.

So what happened next?
Compliance was vital, so I identified some relevant IT frameworks and started negotiating with several suppliers. It was clear that the Trust’s incumbent wasn’t the most competitive, so I negotiated with the vendors and presented the options back to the Trust’s IT and Procurement team.

How did the Trust respond?
Originally, the Trust had always opted to renew this contract annually, so I don’t think they expected us to test the market as extensively as we did. IT and Procurement were really happy when we showed them the potential saving they could make by switching suppliers and changing from an annual to a three-year contract. For a procurement of this size though, we would need to get Finance on board, so I helped collate and present the information necessary for the Trust’s Award Contract Report.

Since they had previously renewed on an annual basis, we had some pushback from Finance about the length of the renewal, so I had to go back to IT and the new supplier to negotiate payment terms that would satisfy all parties.

Once we had everyone on board, we secured the renewal contract via the framework with a total saving of over £16,000 over the three years.

Congrats Jan, a great result!
Yeah, it was a nice saving, but the most important thing for the Trust was that we could take so much of the heavy lifting off their hands. I built an excellent relationship with the Trust’s IT team. They have since asked for help with some of their other contracts, which is very encouraging.

While the project sounds like a straightforward market testing exercise, there’s a huge amount of work that goes into these projects, and I know that neither their Procurement nor IT team would have had the capacity to explore their options as extensively as we could for them.