Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust will be the first to 'go live' on the new system on 1st April 2008 and this encompasses Stock Replenishment, Costing and Tracking. Steve Renfree, Theatres Procurement Manager and Project Manager, has stated "We are implementing this system in all 20 Theatres, within the RCT complex to create efficient ordering and replenishment of stock levels, provide complex management data, and enable the Trust to achieve significant savings". It has been suggested by some trusts, that by implementing this system, that it will be possible to save up to 20% of Theatre Stock expenditure. Reference site visits will be welcomed in due course.

Work has started on the enhanced EROS TACTICA Integration Module. This will be available in EROS release 5.2 which is scheduled for delivery during the second half of 2008.

Maidstone & Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, and The Princess Alexander NHS Trust each successfully implemented financial interfaces between EROS eProcurement and INTEGRA Financials in December 2007. The Interfaces have been implemented to reduce paper work and remove the manual re-entry of purchasing information into the finance system.

Belmin are currently working with TECSOL to provide an improved interface between EROS and the GHX exchange service. The Bristol & Weston Purchasing Consortium will be automating their order despatch process for the 133 suppliers they currently use on the exchange. 30 of these suppliers, including Depuy International Ltd, Boston Scientific Limited, Bard Limited, Medtronic Ltd (cardiac) have full system integration with the exchange so there will be no re-entry of orders into their systems.

The stores module provides a formal stock control system, monitoring stock levels, receipts and issues. It will enable the Trust to greatly improve stock control and reduce wastage and therefore meet Audit requirements.

Jamie Parris, their new Procurement Manager, will be starting the deployment of ARIES at the start of March. ARIES allows automatic reconciliation of supplier invoices with goods receipts in EROS. The successful implementation at County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust achieved a 100% match with over 10,000 invoices processed in the first 12 months. Malcolm Preston (County Durham & Darlington NHS Trust Associate Director of Procurement) says "ARIES has had a major beneficial impact on both the Accounts Payable and Procurement departments. We believe that using ARIES will improve greatly the Trust / Supplier relationship".

Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust have started a project to set up a Contracts portal. The TACTICA Contract Management module provides a central resource that will be used by the trust to achieve effective electronic management of all their contracts. TACTICA (an eTendering, eAuctions and Contract Management system) is currently being used by 13 NHS Trusts and over 1500 organisations Europe wide.

This release includes a large number of customer requested enhancements; an enhanced user interface that further simplifies navigation and improves usability; the new Theatre Stock Module; additional browser functionality (e.g. enhanced order amendment, supplier management, catalogue uploading); and a reduced data load to help speed up response times on busy networks.

The latest release of TACTICA will be installed on the Belmin hosted service in early February. The new release contains: enhancements to the Contract Management Module; a new Tender configuration 'Wizard' to help the user to select the correct tender process; and many customer requested enhancements. Existing customers will have access to the new software automatically.



For further information on any of the above items please contact your Account Manager, either Nicola Thorne (Tel: 01823 430380, e-mail: nicola.thorne@belmin.com) or Dave Warsop (Tel: 01246 270398, e-mail: dave.warsop@belmin.com).