Better Buying
Following the positive response from CSSRs to the approach used by CSED on the Referral, Assessment and Care Management workstream, the same approach will again be applied to help identify and advance process opportunities for supply chain activities.
This provides for CSED to directly work and collaborate with a selection of councils to look at the ways procurements are carried out, from the determination of demand to contractual agreements for service delivery.
Together with councils, CSED will undertake diagnostic studies within individual councils to examine processes, create solutions and assist in the development of the necessary skills to project manage and effect the change required to implement improvements. CSED teams will seek out specific opportunities to identify improvements in quality and reduce costs.
CSED will help transfer skills and knowledge through learning sets, knowledge workshops and skill development.
TRACS: 
Some councils have expressed issues when embarking on either redesigning the ‘buying' process or on information based negotiation with providers. CSED has developed a Tool for Rapid Analysis of Care Services (TRACS©) to help councils solve these problems.
Download the CSED TRACS Overview (PDF) for more information.
For further information about CSED's Better Buying workstream please download the following documents
- CSED Better Buying Overview (PDF)
- CSED Better Buying Diagnostic Overview (PDF)
- CSED Better Buying Diagnostic Overview (Word)
- CSED Buying Obligations in the Public Sector (PDF)
- CSED Internal versus External Assessment (PDF)
- CSED Better Buying - Full Pack (PDF)
Latest Update: March 08
Tool for Rapid Analysis of Care Services (TRACS):With 50% of councils now in various stages of engagement for the uptake of TRACS, the last few months has seen intensive development efforts to ensure flexibility, scalability and maintainability of the application. The following list summarises the main new features:
Functionality: New additions include: The ability to model cost and volume changes to all forms of care package, not just those with associated pricing tables. This works by allowing a subset of care management data to be defined using a point-and-click defined filter based upon information loaded into TRACS. Percentage changes in cost and/or volume terms are applied to one or more of these ‘filters'. This functionality particularly lends itself to analysis of changes to residential/nursing services e.g. simulating the impact of changes in the number and or cost of learning disability placements.There is much greater flexibility for testing ideas on charging what is purchased for a service. For example, it is quick to test the impact of switching a percentage of existing 15-minute visits to longer visits or for testing the potential ramifications ofan increasing uptake of individual budgets/direct payments. Analysis options around package changes (increases, decreases, etc.) have also been added. Finally, this version of TRACS introduces scenarios (options) where changes can be stored and retrieved for all option variables, changes to demographics, restructured pricing models, simply tenderevaluation impacts.
Client Level Matching: Many councils operate disparate systems across the spectrum of social care services, where clients are identified by different codes. CSED have developed fuzzy matching logic to help councils identify duplicate clients within a single system or link clients across multiple systems. This functionality, originally developed to support contract rationalisation across adult social services and supporting people services also lends itself to understanding where clients are receiving multiple packages (and which clients are potentially natural candidates for individual budgets).Improved Performance and Reliability: Data extraction and processing from the wide variety of council care management systems was always recognised as a major challenge. Whilst the team are still playing catch-up with sites from whom we already have data, we are optimistic that, moving forward, we now have solutions for CareFirst, Swift and others which largely automate the process.
We are confident that this will be less than a days work for such systems.Remote Support: As summarised in the last newsletter, in order to support the increasing number of councils starting to use TRACS we have developed three solutions to assist ongoing support: Email based fault / enhancement reporting in conjunction with much more extensive error trapping; "Hotfix" functionality whereby urgent changes to any part of the application can be emailed to a council and automatically installed; and "Full patch" functionality whereby major version changes can be automatically incorporated.Future enhancements: TRACS now has rudimentary geographical mapping via the Google mapping services, allowing any selected data to be plotted onto Google maps and/or satellite images. This will help councils identify in geographical terms client and provider patterns which are not otherwise obvious.
Moving forward we fully intend to provide an interface to otherCSED branded products such as FLOSCand are investigating the suitability of TRACS to act as "middleware" for other regional / national data sets. e.g. Contract databases, HH1 councilreturns (homecare hours delivered), etc.Internal versus External Toolkit: Interest in the structured approach to analysing internal costs and comparing them against external equivalents continues to be almost as great as the interest in TRACS. To date this toolkit has only been available on an as-requested basis and only to those where we have had some form of context setting discussion. We are now working on a fully documented enhanced version of this toolkit. This will reflect learning arising from its adoption by other councils and will be made available on a much broader basis ahead of the new financial year. Interest in this toolkit has been stimulated by the need for many councils to more accurately price their internal services.Other Better Buying Products: The Better Buying Diagnostic continues to be relevant, where councils increasingly focus on their commissioning capabilities -this is available for download via our website. For those of you who were unable to pick up laminated A3 versions of our simple guidance to EU legislation at our national events, following the appetite for these atthe events, we have had another 100 made up. This guidance -available in electronic form via the web -is designed to demystify elements of procurement law as it applies to Social Services. If you would like a laminated A3 version please get in touch with your local CSED representative to get your copy.
"I can not see how you can do strategic commissioning without a tool like TRACS"
Lee Woolway, Projects Officer Resource Management, Sheffield City Council
To read about the work in your area please visit your region's page.
This workstream is led by Mike Charnley-Fisher (07710 381 694)
