Developing Geographical Information Systems

The Scottish Government Rural Payment and Inspections Directorate (RPID) is responsible for the administration and payment of EU Common Agricultural Policy subsidies to farmers in Scotland.  In accordance with EU regulations, all fields of the farmers must be registered with RPID before EU subsidies can be claimed.

Historically, all plotting and digitising services were supplied by Ordnance Survey, with a 'read only' Geographical Information System (GIS) at RPID.  As farmers made changes to their fields, the Scottish Government had to record these changes manually and send the information to Ordnance Survey, which would then refresh the maps on a monthly basis.  With approximately 400,000 active fields on the system to monitor, this was a huge task for RPID.  Every change to field boundaries had to be authorised using a Field Maintenance Request (FMR) sheet and each FMR contained more than one field, which resulted in an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 field amendments per annum.  The process of dealing with the FMRs was time consuming, expensive and resulted in unacceptable backlogs.

Solution

In order to streamline the process, RPID decided to bring the plotting and digitising services in-house using its own IT system.

RPID asked Sopra Group, one of the UK's leading IT services and solutions consultancies, to design and develop the new system.  Sopra Group was already working with RPID as part of an ongoing contract and the company had the necessary expertise and understanding of RPID's business needs and existing systems to create the bespoke GIS required.

Over a period of six months, Sopra Group consultants worked with RPID to develop an integrated electronic system to replace the previously outdated, unresponsive and expensive approach to administering requests submitted by farmers.

Benefits

Sopra Group developed a real-time updating GIS which allows RPID to control its business process and data.  This has delivered significant benefits to RPID:

• Real time updating and plotting of GIS data has given RPID control of its own business processes and data with no need to rely on third parties
• Ability to use non-GIS staff rather than GIS technical experts to maintain spatial data
• Significantly reduced cycle times and improved throughput of field maintenance requests
• Enables RPID to supply a better service to farmers through an improved process.

The average time taken to digitise field changes has been drastically reduced from an average of 60 days before the introduction of the new approach to an impressive three days.