The NHS’s supply chain operation has contracted India-headquartered Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to transform IT in a further sign that India’s IT suppliers are winning significant UK public sector business.

The project at the organisation, which manages the sourcing and supply of healthcare and other products for NHS trusts, is part of the NHS’s plan to meet its target to save £1bn in costs by 2030.

It also represents a major win for TCS, a $30bn global IT giant, as it continues to grow its UK public sector business and comes hot on the heels of a massive NHS deal with TCS’s fellow India-headquartered rival Infosys.

The NHS supply chain transformation with TCS will include the use of the cloud and artificial intelligence (AI), and see legacy software replaced by a modern supply chain enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

“Ultimately, it will enhance our operational efficiency and service delivery as we work towards our commitment to unlock over £1bn in recurrent value by 2030,” said Matthew Wynn, executive director data and technology at NHS Supply Chain. “Working alongside our teams, TCS will help modernise our legacy systems into a more streamlined, cloud-based environment. This shift will strengthen our resilience, improve user experience and enable us to respond faster to changing business and customer needs.”

TCS’s ambitions in the UK, and the public sector specifically, are clear. Speaking to Computer Weekly about TCS’s UK public sector plans last year, Amit Kapur, who was its UK country head at the time, said there was “potential, paucity and action” with “good engagement”.

The firm, India’s biggest IT services provider, recently announced the creation of 5,000 jobs in the UK, taking the workforce to 27,000 – about 5% of its global workforce of around 600,000. TCS said the NHS deal will be enabled in part by the UK-based jobs it recently created.

Growing presence

With trade ties between India and the UK growing, Indian IT services companies will look to benefit further. These suppliers have a significant chunk of corporate sector business with most of the UK’s largest firms outsourcing to them already, but they are relatively small in the public sector.

Traditionally, there were fears that UK jobs were being offshored to India. With huge numbers of people working in the UK public sector, governments were reluctant to use Indian suppliers for fear of a backlash. There were also security concerns regarding public sector data residing in Indian datacentres.

But today, the suppliers have large UK presences and IT infrastructures. Vinay Singhvi, TCS’s UK boss, said: “TCS has operated in the UK for over 50 years, and we recently committed to hiring and training over 5,000 new UK based workers, and they will, in part, support transformative projects like these.”

TCS has won significant deals in the public sector in recent months, with the BBC and the department of education recently penning IT contracts with it.

Infosys, another of India’s IT giants, also recently announced a major win in the public sector with a 15-year, £1.2bn deal with the NHS to deliver an HR system. To put its significance into perspective, before signing the £1.2bn deal to provide what is described as an integrated HR and payroll system across the NHS, Infosys had just £7.45m in active UK public sector contracts.

According to figures from Tussell, the Indian IT giant has only won 36 contracts since 2012, to a total value of £87.2m.

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