by N Burrell, Marketing Exec, Research and Analytics, CIPFA
If you are keen to assess performance and pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of your support functions, we can help. CIPFA has an extensive range of benchmarking data for back office functions such as finance, human resources, procurement, communications, estates management, ICT and legal.
CIPFA’s recent annual user satisfaction survey highlighted 'monitoring trends' and being 'departmental cost aware' as two of the key benefits our VfM indicators members enjoy.
The 2018 Value for Money (VfM) indicators service enables you to keep track of your back-office function by comparing your current performance figures with that of previous years, and with other similar organisations.
The VfM indicators benchmarking information provides the ideal platform for investigations, allowing you to understand the impact savings can have on organisational performance. For example, according to our data:
- Despite a decrease in service costs, performance improvements are reported for NHS Trusts, central government, and local government.
- NHS Foundation Trusts managed to achieve the highest improvement in performance followed by local and central government.
- If we consider finance indicators, stream service costs and performance from 2013 to 2017, the average finance costs have decreased, but the impact of the effectiveness of performance give very different results for NHS Trusts, central government, and local government.
One of our valued NHS sector customers had this to say about VfM Indicators benchmarking:
“We find the CIPFA VfM Indicators exercise useful for establishing baseline performance against other NHS Trusts and the corporate world. It is useful to monitor the success of the improvements we have made following previous benchmarks, and the associated actions put into place to address some of the lower performing areas.”
Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
If you want to gain a better insight into your organisation’s back-office functions, you can join CIPFA’s Value for Money Indicators Benchmarking exercise.