Case Study:
The Coal Authority
Anyone who has ever bought a house in the Midlands, North of England, Central
Scotland or South Wales (and many other parts of Great Britain) is likely to have
done business – either directly or through their solicitor – with the Coal Authority. Every year it provides over 500,000 mining reports to prospective purchasers
of property on or near coalfields past or present, reports that are seen as an
essential pre-contract precaution.
Keenly aware of its duty to provide the best possible public service at the lowest cost, it undertook a major review of its operations for the new millennium, and decided that time had run out for its outdated computers and time-consuming paperwork.
It needed new, efficient IT. But how to design it, run it, and pay for it? Capgemini rode to the rescue with an innovative ‘build and run’ proposal under the new Private Finance Initiative (PFI) scheme. We agreed to fund the bulk of the new investment in new systems and then run them on a ‘pay-as-you-go’ long-term contract.
The results have been a huge success. The new systems have coped easily with a phenomenal 90% expansion in volumes (the result of the national housing boom) while response times to customers have been reduced by 80% and costs have been significantly lowered, with the savings passed on to customers in the form of a 25% price cut. Small wonder that customer satisfaction has risen to record levels.
Together, our work with the Coal Authority has won a number of major awards, including the British Computer Society’s Best IT Management Project of 2002 and the Management Consultancies Association’s Best Outsourcing Project in 2003.
