Fast forecasts strengthen finance at Manchester University NHS Trust

To support quality patient care as demand surges and changes, the finance team at Manchester University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) replaced siloed, manual forecasting processes with a fast, connected process built in Anaplan. The new solution frees up 100+ staff days per month for financial analysis and gives financial planners instant access to the current financial position of every hospital and service within the MFT.

Manchester University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) has been at the forefront of medical innovation for more than three centuries. Today, the 30,000-person organization provides care for over one million people annually through ten hospitals and a network of clinical and community services.

Like many other organizations in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), MFT is seeing patient demand for its services rise dramatically. “Growing patient numbers, backlogs from the pandemic, and high inflation have put additional pressure on the finite resources available to us,” explains Edd Berry, Director of Finance Innovation at MFT, “so planning is incredibly important to our organization. Our job is to make sure that we’re as efficient and effective as possible with the resources that we have.”

To deliver value to the public, MFT creates monthly financial forecasts for every hospital, department, and clinical service. Delays or errors during this process can negatively impact patient services.

“Our team of 100 financial experts would spend over three days collecting information from our core finance system, validating and then aggregating data before they could work on forecasts,” Berry recalls. “This approach was siloed and piecemeal, and the risk of mistakes was quite high.”

Real-time visibility across the organization

To accelerate and improve its forecasting process, MFT deployed the Anaplan platform. “Anaplan is an excellent tool and a real game-changer for MFT,” says Berry. “It feels like the equivalent of going from paper ledgers to spreadsheets — it’s that big a change, and it opens up lots of possibilities.”

Department heads and financial planners at MFT now input data directly into a centralized forecasting model in Anaplan. “What's really powerful about Anaplan is that everything is instantaneous,” reflects Berry. “Our finance team can just log straight into the system and see whether each department has submitted their figures, who might need a nudge, or if there are any issues that we should address before moving on to analysis.”

Saving time, improving agility and response

With Anaplan as the foundation for monthly forecasting, financial planners at MFT work much more efficiently. “As a result of the Anaplan model, at least 100 days a month is saved for all of the finance team,” explains Berry. “As well as helping us to produce monthly forecasts faster, Anaplan has made life much easier for our team by cutting out days of laborious assembly and data validation. Now, our experts can focus on analyzing the data and helping to improve efficiency and service.”

Moving to Anaplan has sparked a step-change in the way MFT builds forecasts and financial plans. “When we complete a planning cycle in Anaplan, we have immediate access to our organization’s financial position, from the hospital level up to the entire group,” explains Berry. “It’s that instantaneous ability to see the information that we never had before, and that’s really changed how we're able to work. Being able to access the data really quickly is priceless, particularly in today’s environment where we need to be responsive to many challenges.”

MFT is already looking forward to making further enhancements with Anaplan. “We’ve only just started on our Anaplan transformation,” says Berry. “As we expand our use of Anaplan across the organization and upskill our teams, we anticipate even greater efficiency and more opportunities to save.”