Food Standards Agency

Executive Summary

The FSA receives 1000s of pieces of correspondence annually. Most of these require a response or some form of action. The nature of the response typically contains factual information that necessitates 100% accuracy.

The FSA are responsible for keeping the UK food supply chain safe and as such, are under constant scrutiny. Furthermore, The FSA is accountable to the Cabinet Office in regard to providing reports that are subsequently referenced by Ministers to make Public Statements.

Inbound correspondence types vary, from seeking information to official FOI requests, all of which must be dealt with in a timely, consistent and accurate manner.

The Problem

Correspondence and Freedom Of Information (FOI) Management System

The legacy process that The FSA used to construct response correspondence were manual and tracked in Excel, paper-based notes and email inboxes.

The nature of this system proved challenging to process incoming correspondence and produce response letters in a timely fashion. Freedom Of Information requests were also subject to robust legislation, hence it was imperative that the response time-frame was adhered to – Non-compliance resulted in financial penalties and in extreme cases, prosecution.

The FSA brief centered around the urgent need for an automated solution to manage correspondence and FOI requests

The Solution

The Velocity IT solution transformed the existing process by orchestrating the assignment of every case to a case worker, sending automated escalation emails if response times were not adhered to, and tasked QA personnel to ensure that the quality and accuracy of correspondence remained consistent.

Due to the nature in which the legacy process was handled Velocity IT adopted a simple RAG status to quickly present a priority status, inline with the SLA’s

The automation of the process provided the following benefits:

• Major saving in issuing response letters was achieved
• Significant reduction in mistakes and inconsistencies
• Visibility of all cases at any one time and indication of priority , to alert a potential SLA breach
• System produced Management Information (MI) reports for regulatory requirements
• Visual status of cases to enable Case Worker performance reviews and KPI measurement

The Outcome

The solution presented an enhanced customer experience due to the significant reduction in processing times. Automatic compliancy reports and powerful management information provide valuable, detailed insight into the department’s overall performance and enable the agency to scale.