South Central Ambulance Service NHS Trust
(Large Southern England based ambulance trust)
History
The South Central Ambulance Service NHS Trust came into being on 1st July 2006,
following the merger of the four ambulance trusts covering the counties of Hampshire,
Berkshire, Oxfordshire and part of Buckinghamshire. The Trust covers an area
of circa 4,600sq miles with a resident population of approximately 4 million.
Additionally in some areas, they also provide non-patient transport services
within the health environment, e.g. transporting medical supplies and samples
and transporting medical staff between locations.
They operate from three divisions, each served from a local Divisional HQ in
Winchester, Wokingham and Oxford and they also have the former Two Shires HQ
facility in Deanshanger, looking after the Buckinghamshire area. The ambulance
control centres based at these sites handle more than 340,000 emergency and
urgent calls per year.
With the merger came a requirement to move to a single financial accounting
system. As two of the divisions already used the MIS Active Management Systems
financial systems (renowned for its functionality and reliability) the decision
was made to implement the next generation of SQL based Microsoft Dynamics GP
applications, which were now being distributed by MIS AMS as an upgrade to their
old financial system.
Implementation
The decision to implement Microsoft Dynamics GP across the four divisions was made in December 2006, with the ledgers scheduled to be live by the new financial year.
This made for a challenging implementation schedule over a three month period.
With a dedicated team of four MIS Active Management Systems staff and the South Central Ambulance NHS Trust product champion, a new SQL server and failover backup were installed on a new Citrix network with access from the four divisions.
Staff from the four divisions were trained on the new system over a three week period, with additional training provided for the product champion to help with in house implementation issues.
A brand new chart of accounts was created to cover the four divisions by South Central Ambulance NHS Trust and imported successfully into Microsoft Dynamics GP.
All existing suppliers and live transactions were also imported successfully from the four separate legacy systems.
To further complicate matters, during the implementation period, South Central Ambulance NHS Trust were also going through organisational changes required to centralise their accounting procedures as well as gearing up for the year end procedures.
As result of the great effort by all parties involved, and under very difficult circumstances, Microsoft Dynamics GP was rolled out to all four divisions in readiness for the start of the new financial year in April 2007.
Following the implementation, the systems have continued to grow as additional modules have been implemented, and further staff trained to provide a comprehensive database of information for the new Trust.
