This article was originally featured in the HFMA December 2025 magazine. You can view the PDF version here, or read the full article below.

Collaboration with Control in the NHS

As Integrated Care Systems continue to mature, NHS organisations are seeking new ways to collaborate across boundaries while maintaining operational control and accountability. The challenge is a familiar one: how to work collectively for the greater good of the NHS, without risking local autonomy or financial control.

The NEP Cloud solution offers a compelling answer. Built on Oracle Fusion Cloud technology and governed by the NHS, for the NHS, it provides a shared, cloud-based environment where organisations can manage finance and procurement processes within a single, standardised template. What distinguishes NEP Cloud is not merely its technology, but its ethos of collaboration with control, enabling NHS bodies to share services, data and learning across geographical and organisational boundaries while remaining firmly in charge of their own operations.

In a time when efficiency, transparency and partnership are national directives, NEP Cloud demonstrates how modern digital infrastructure can strengthen, rather than dilute, local accountability. It embodies the spirit of collective improvement that has long defined the NHS. Fully enabling shared resources, shared goals and shared success.

A Modern Model for a Modern NHS

At its core, NEP Cloud is a templated ERP platform built on Oracle Cloud Fusion – a solution that NEP has not only adopted but helped shape and mature within an NHS context.

Having transitioned to the Oracle Fusion Cloud environment in early 2018, NEP stands as one of the most established and experienced implementers of this technology across the NHS.

While many organisations are still in the early stages of implementation or exploring migration, NEP has been successfully operating, developing and scaling the solution for over eight years. This longevity has enabled NEP to optimise functionality, build a proven template that support the diverse needs of different NHS organisations – including acute, community and mental health trusts, as well as integrated care systems and shared service models. The result is a robust, scalable and continuously evolving solution that has demonstrated its ability to grow with the needs of member organisations while maintaining performance, resilience and compliance. It brings together finance and procurement into one fully templated system, fully accessible across all member organisations.

Unlike commercial outsourcing models, NEP Cloud operates as a not-for-profit NHS consortium. Member organisations are both customers and co-owners. This collaborative structure ensures that strategic decisions about functionality, investment and priorities are made collectively, guided by NHS values and operational realities rather than external profit motives.

The platform represents the next stage in the NHS’s journey towards a consistent, data-driven, and digitally enabled back-office environment, one that aligns with the Future-Focused Finance and Digital Shared Services agendas championed nationally. It delivers the benefits of scale and standardisation without compromising the principle of local control.

Collaboration and Shared Governance

NEP Cloud’s most powerful feature is its collaborative governance model. Participating organisations do not simply use the platform, they actively shape its direction. Through collective decision-making and shared accountability, members work together to design, develop, and deliver shared services that extend across Integrated Care Board (ICB) groupings and geographical areas. This approach builds on the NHS’s long tradition of partnership working, fostering a culture of cooperation, mutual support and shared ambition.

This collaborative structure ensures that new developments, upgrades and policy changes are driven by NHS finance and procurement professionals, who understand the operational realities of the health care system. The consortium membership contributes its expertise to ensure that solutions are practical, scalable and aligned with local and regional priorities. Learning, best practice and innovation are shared openly across the network, enabling progress that benefits everyone equally and strengthens system-wide capability.

Beyond the technical advantages, NEP Cloud has created a genuine professional community, a unified environment where finance and procurement teams across the country operate within a common framework of shared processes and consistent data structures. This unity reduces duplication and inefficiency, while enabling benchmarking, collaboration and cross-organisational service delivery. It allows organisations to share expertise, streamline resources and deliver shared outcomes that support both local needs and national objectives.

In essence, NEP Cloud exemplifies how collaboration and shared governance can turn collective effort into collective strength – supporting a more connected, efficient and sustainable NHS.

A few words from our consortium members

“Being a consortium member brings many advantages, the main one being the collective knowledge and idea generation that is made possible by the collaboration of multiple finance and procurement specialists.  In essence, the consortium is collectively working to achieve the same outcome in the most efficient and effective way.’’

 

‘’NEP continues to flourish demonstrating how our NHS colleagues manage, develop and run the most successful finance & procurement Cloud solution in the NHS today. The collaboration across the membership is exceptional and validates its place within the NHS. We should all be proud to be part of our very own NHS solution.’’

Local Control and Accountability

While collaboration sits at the heart of NEP Cloud, control remains firmly local. Each organisation within the NEP Consortium retains full authority over its operations, data, and governance. Unlike outsourced arrangements, where functions are handed over to a third party, NEP Cloud enables NHS organisations to run their own processes within a shared environment as and how they see fit.

This model is closely aligned with the NHS principles of subsidiarity and stewardship – ensuring that decisions are made as near as possible to the point of impact, by those directly accountable for outcomes. Each organisation retains full oversight of its financial and operational performance, including adherence to financial timetables and reporting schedules. In turn, this approach has already enabled numerous organisations to meet day one reporting requirements, fully supported by real-time data and transparent reporting.

For many organisations, this restoration of control has been a key attraction. It allows finance leaders to tailor processes to local needs while maintaining alignment with national standards. In effect, NEP Cloud combines the discipline of a unified system with the flexibility of local decision-making, a balance rarely achieved in large-scale public-sector programmes.

Shared Services Across Systems and Geography

The platform is particularly well-suited to supporting collaborative working across geographical areas and ICB groups. As NHS systems move toward greater integration, the ability to operate shared finance or procurement functions across multiple organisations becomes increasingly valuable.

NEP Cloud’s single templated, cloud-based architecture enables this naturally. Partner organisations within an Integrated Care System can share administrative resources, co-ordinate purchasing activity, and report on financial performance across the entire system, all within the same data environment.

This capability provides consistent, comparable information to system leaders which is a key enabler for strategic planning and collective financial management.

In practical terms, this means:

• Shared finance teams can operate across multiple trusts with consistent processes and access to shared data.
• Joint procurement functions can leverage greater purchasing power while maintaining local control of budgets and suppliers.
• System-wide reporting gives ICBs a unified view of performance and resource utilisation.

By supporting shared services across organisational and geographical boundaries, NEP Cloud is helping the NHS realise the long-standing ambition of “system first” working, where collaboration is built into the infrastructure itself.

Efficiency Through Standardisation

Standardisation is often misunderstood as a loss of flexibility. In NEP Cloud, it is a source of strength. By aligning processes and data structures across participating organisations, the platform simplifies reporting, strengthens assurance and reduces the administrative burden on local teams.

The consistency also improves data quality and insight. With all member organisations working from a centralised, reliable data source, performance can be analysed accurately and compared fairly. This supports national transparency requirements while enabling local teams to make faster, more informed decisions.

Moreover, as the platform is fully cloud-based, software updates, compliance changes, and security enhancements are managed centrally, ensuring every organisation benefits simultaneously, without the complexity or cost of maintaining local systems.

A Platform for the Future NHS

As the NHS continues to evolve into a system of systems, NEP Cloud demonstrates how collaboration and control can coexist. It is not simply a technological upgrade but a model of partnership that reflects the enduring values of the health service: collective strength, local accountability and public service.

The platform’s NHS ownership ensures that investment decisions are made for long-term benefit, not short-term profit. Its collaborative governance embeds mutual respect and shared learning. And its digital foundations position it to integrate seamlessly with future developments in analytics, automation and system-wide data sharing.

In many ways, NEP Cloud is more than a shared system, it is a shared movement, embodying how the NHS can modernise without losing the principles on which it was built.

As organisations and ICBs look ahead to the next phase of transformation, NEP Cloud stands as a practical demonstration of what is possible when technology supports collaboration and when the NHS truly works together as one.