NHS Blood & Transplant Unit

The NHS Blood and Transplant Unit provides blood and platelet donations and organ, stem cell, and tissue donation and transplantation. It also delivers specialist therapeutic and diagnostic services and is a leader in scientific research. Headquartered in Bristol, the department has 15 centres across the UK, collects around 2.1 million donations per year, and supplies 8,000 units of blood every day.

NHS Blood and Transplant Unit had a requirement to enhance and develop the management of donation, storage and transplantation of blood. As part of a strategic programme, they had implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM as their platform of choice. The platform had been live for approximately 18 months and had around 200-300 users. NHS Blood and Transplant Unit aimed to extend the platform, increasing to 600 users. However, before doing so it needed to carry out a technical audit to evaluate the system before the rollout of the next phase.

To ensure NHS Blood and Transplant could meet its deadlines there was a tight timeline in which to review every aspect of the system and produce a detailed audit report.

The organisation selected Pragmatiq to carry out a comprehensive technical audit. Pragmatiq has extensive experience in providing value to businesses by leveraging the Microsoft Dynamics platform and provides a range of services, including Consultancy & Audits, Implementation, User Training, and Helpdesk Support.

Pragmatiq began the audit by speaking to the staff from the existing IT partner that implemented the Dynamics CRM platform. Looking deeply into the platform, the CRM functionality, and the supporting systems & services, they were able to assess whether their current set-up would properly support the upgrade to 600 users.

This required extensive auditing, including establishing the efficacy of secure user authentication, and all other technical elements of the implementation including functional configuration, database customization and extensions, plug-ins, and the usage of the Azure service bus, to name but a few.

Through the implementation of our proposed solution, the following benefits were realised:

• The report outlined all the indicators and the recommendations for which preventive actions should be taken to ensure that the system was stable to support the upgrade.
• This also ensured the security requirements were met, as well as the functional & technical requirements of its users.
• The audit provided NHS Blood and Transplant Unit with detailed insight into the Dynamics CRM platform and valuable feedback on the application development. This gave it the confidence to move ahead with its strategic objectives.
• The audit provided recommendations for future consideration and potential usage of other Microsoft technologies.