Triad helps the Office for Product Safety & Standards to consolidate and improve systems, without the premium of a new platform
Summary
The Office for Product Safety & Standards (OPSS) regulates a wide range of products, focusing on their safety and integrity. They are also responsible for monitoring the importation of goods into the UK border, intervening where standards fall short.
A team of six Triad specialists ran a Discovery Project for the OPSS Border Profiling Unit (BPU), identifying how their current system for monitoring the arrival of product consignments into the UK could be improved.
OPSS were delighted with our strategy to create a common platform by consolidating two separate systems. Improved data quality and reporting from a common platform will enable OPSS to make better-informed decisions and intercept a larger quantity of unsafe products at the border. A common platform will also enable data to be shared within OPSS and other affected organisations, such as local authorities and HMRC.
About the client
About the client
The Office for Product Safety & Standards (OPSS) is part of the Department for Business and Trade; it regulates a wide range of products to help deliver consumer protection and to support business confidence, productivity and growth. As part of this role, it monitors the importation of goods across the UK border, intervening when necessary.
The challenge
The Challenge
Triad was asked to run a Discovery Project for the OPSS Border Profiling Unit (BPU). The BPU use a case management system on Microsoft Dynamics 365 to assess the risk of all consignments coming into the UK at the border.
The project had three goals:
- To determine the viability of merging the BPU’s case management system into an existing case management system, avoiding duplication of information and facilitating data sharing between OPSS teams.
- To recommend a solution that would record appropriate data about cases and inspection outcomes in one place, so that the BPU can use it to fine-tune their ability to detect non-compliant or dangerous goods at the border.
- To utilise our UX expertise to understand users’ experiences of the BPU case management process and suggest how it could be made quicker and easier for them.
The solution
The Solution
We adopted an Agile approach, presenting recommendations in the form of a backlog and epics, which we went through with the implementation team.
Our approach will result in a single system that combines local authority information with existing case management insight and data on a unified Microsoft Dynamics instance. This will enable OPSS to fulfil its obligation as a national regulator, protecting the public from the risk of harm caused by having unsafe or non-compliant products circulating in the UK market.
We also found potential data synergies with other systems. We recommended aligning data points such as the product taxonomy which would then allow automated data flows between systems, letting specialists focus on the critical process rather than data entry.
The result
The Results
The Discovery project demonstrated Triad’s ability to save OPSS substantial time and money by seamlessly merging with an existing case management system. This will create significant benefits at a fraction of the cost of building a new system:
- A user-friendly system that will minimise data duplication and save case handling time.
- Improved data quality and reporting, so that case data and inspection outcomes are held in one place. This will also enable better qualification of goods at the border.
- A new risk assessment process to aid better-informed decisions and intercept a larger quantity of unsafe products at the border.
- Systems integration with local authorities.
- Manage Border Force cases in the BPU system.
- Improve Document transfer from HMRC systems.
“The team impressively scaled up at short notice to deliver a robust discovery that has provided clear direction for us to improve our operations at the border. The Discovery team engaged across wide and complex stakeholder areas to understand requirements and provided technical expertise to plan out a complex system integration. It was a pleasure having the team on board, thank you all.”
Jack Holland, Head of Digital & Technology, Office for Product Safety & Standards.
