Mark in Action win for NHS SCCL project

During July’s Mark In Action ceremony, Liz Ford, Quality Administrator at Unipart Logistics, received an award for her contribution and support during a change project. We caught up with her to find out more…

“The NHS Supply Chain had used a quality management system called Q-Pulse for around 15 years. It was a really good system but it's had its time. It was due to be discontinued, with technical support being revoked by the provider. SCCL needed to replace it with something more modern and intuitive.

"The system is primarily used by Unipart to house documentation including policies and procedures, and securely record all audits and non conformances. It is a very important part of the Integrated Management System and used across the business... My job is generally managing the system as a whole, making sure the information that goes into it is correct - version control, formatting - stuff like that.”

When Liz’s line manager was pulled onto other projects, Liz knew she had to take the reins: “I thought ‘It's my wheelhouse. I manage the system on behalf of Unipart Logistics’ and I needed to step up. So I attended all the initial calls and went away, got all of our stakeholder needs together, put those back into the meetings. Between Unipart and SCCL, we came up with a list of requirements that we needed for the new system.

“SCCL went away and came back with three systems that were possible. A new version of the one that we've got currently, Navex or Oracle. We went through the demos and decided that Navex best suits our requirements.

"There was then what seemed like endless months of calls; gathering all the information and feeding in our requirements, making sure key needs weren’t lost, followed by several months of testing and reconfiguring done mainly by myself and my counterpart in SCCL.”

Looking back on the project, Liz felt pushed out of her comfort zone: “I was nervous a lot of the time thinking ‘Am I making the right decisions here?’ A lot of our stakeholders rely on the system on a daily basis, so it had to be up to scratch and it had to be relatively intuitive. It's been a challenge but it's boosted my confidence.

“We’ve soft launched the system and are in the training stage now. It’s a very different system today from the out-the-box version. A lot has gone into the configuration of the system, with trial and error along the way and in the testing. We wanted to make the user experience the best it could be.”

Whilst Liz wasn’t able to make it to the in-person ceremony, she did get to celebrate the achievement with her colleagues at the UL Normanton site...

“Due to a health condition, travelling is an issue for me. The Mark in Action team sent someone to our Normanton site so I could still join the ceremony virtually, via a live-feed. It turned out really good in the end - all of my team turned up and we went out for lunch after so it was a lovely day. Various people from the site came in to watch the award too.”

There is still time to submit your Mark in Action nominations for consideration for the next ceremony on Tuesday 1st October 2024.

If you aren't sure whether your story is a Mark in Action or not, then you can contact Mark in Action Manager Katie Geddes who can advise and support you through the nomination process.

The full Mark in Action ceremony from July 2024 is available to watch here.