Birmingham & Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust has started using a package it claims has let it save as much as 24% on price in a bid to cut technology cuts.

David Thomas, Head of Procurement at the Trust, said: “When we compiled prices for a random selection of recently bought products and compared them using this product, it demonstrated we could have saved an average of 10% on price. This more than justified the investment.”

Early use has found that on one major purchase the lowest price quoted was 3% higher than expected; use of that data allowed the Trust to save over £1,000, for instance.

The system is also reported to have shaved off 20% of the time the IT team had previously been spending manually benchmarking supplier prices.