Customer Checklist For Ease Of Ordering

There are a variety of ways in which you can place your order with NHS Supply Chain, and we appreciate that it can be confusing. If you are new to ordering or need a refresher, here are our top tips to ensure your orders can be as smooth as possible.

See our Downloads section for a printable pdf to put up in your office.

• Save orders if you will be leaving your computer for more than 10 minutes.
• Log out of your account when you have finished placing your order.
• Regularly review and update the Trust Administrators, User Maintenance / Authoriser roles.

• Consider reviewing products on your Standing Orders / Favourite lists on a regular basis.
• Consider reviewing your Masked products and Financial Coding.
• Review the Unsatisfied Requisition (Req) Lines report as soon as possible to understand unsatisfied demand or product information.

• We recommend not to use a saved favourite directly to the Online Ordering page as this may cause caching issues. Saved favourite to our NHS Supply Chain main website is the best approach.
• Always ensure you have a Trust and Req point selected on your account before searching the catalogue or placing an order.

• Regularly update your Materials Management Database (MMD) and Stock / Local catalogues on the PDAs.
• Local Catalogue – if you maintain local lists (for example Excel spreadsheets) these should be maintained regularly.
• Review non stock interfaces and ensure that planned changes are notified to us in due course.
• Put PDAs on charge when not being used.
• Review on a regular basis the configuration of Requirements and Req points.

• Regularly review order standards or methods to ensure the most up to date standards are being used. This would be XML / PEPPOL at the moment.
• Send orders to NHS Supply Chain before 4pm.
• Be fully aware of whom in the trust receives either the TX (Order Acknowledgement) reports and / or status 200 messages with order updates.
• Review third party systems to ensure all data is present and up to date (Delivery Location, Req Points, Depots, Financial Coding for example).

• Customers not using catalogue providers who receive our catalogue either via a direct URL or FTP should be updating their systems every day.
• Make sure (be confident) your catalogue providers are updating the catalogues every day, the customers and / or providers should then make any changes to their systems as appropriate.

• There are a number of useful customer reports available to the NHS. Some of which are available online and others need to be requested via Customer Services.
• TR reports and suspended lines reports are available online.
• Unsatisfied lines, transaction errors and discontinued lines reports are available via Customer Services.