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The Coal Authority Offers Award-Winning Public Service at Lower Cost in the UK via Innovative Contract Yielding Major Benefit

The Coal Authority maintains and provides details of coal mining activity throughout Britain.

Mining reports provide information on past or present coal mining operations and are a pre-requisite in the conveyancing process to help solicitors, surveyors, local authorities and the general public assess the risks with a property purchase in coalfield areas.

Reporting systems were unable to support future growth in demand and were at risk of total failure. Capgemini successfully competed as partner to help design, build and run a new system to support Mining Reports, now and well into the future.

The results include far better public service at lower cost from the Authority, professionally delivered outsourcing services, and an award that prompted the IT Manager to acknowledge:

“Lots of thanks are due to our technology partners, Capgemini, who fielded a world-class team.”

Client Profile

The Coal Authority, a public sector body in the UK, maintains and provides details of coal mining activity throughout Britain. The Authority supplies in excess of 500,000 mining reports a year, mainly to solicitors acting for property buyers of land on or near coalfields, past or present, in England, Scotland and Wales.

The reports give purchasers vital information about coal mining activity carried out under or near properties and are regarded by mortgage lenders, insurers etc as a fundamental pre-requisite in the property purchase process.

The boom in property purchases, coupled with an explosion in re-mortgaging has led to a dramatic increase in demand for Mining Reports from the Authority.

Business Issues

The Authority was determined to achieve the highest standards in the service it offered the property-buying public, and in its own cost-efficiency on behalf of the British taxpayer. However, the operational inheritance from its predecessors revolved around an outmoded ‘mainframe’ computer supplemented by much use of slow, inefficient, labour-intensive pen-and-paper methods.

It was clear by the late 1990s that existing methods and IT could not fully support the faster and more responsive service that the Authority sought to provide. Systems were based on obsolete technology that was increasingly difficult to support, and as they were not millennium compliant, were at risk of failure.

The challenge was complicated by the need to maintain and access one of the largest geographical databases in Europe. This included over 50 gigabytes of Ordnance Survey data and huge volumes of coal mining data including paper records dating back to the 18th century. It was taking up to 10 days to respond to queries from property purchasers and solicitors. High reliance on labour-dependent processes led to potential inaccuracy. There was of course no provision for email queries. Clearly a new computer-based system, given the name MRSDS (Mining Reports and Surface Damage System), was urgently needed. The new system would become the Authority’s key IT application, lying at the heart of all its statutory activities.

Searching attention to every business requirement would therefore be vital, and in particular:

• providing rapid, accurate and comprehensive Mining Reports upon request to solicitors, surveyors, local authorities and the general public
• improving internal efficiency and productivity in producing the reports
• eliminating risks of systems failure that could prevent the Authority from discharging its statutory duties
• providing safe, methodical and accessible digital storage for the Authority’s collection of mining data, which forms a unique historical resource
• catering for the needs of up to one hundred users, including staff at the Coal Authority as well as external users linking remotely
• providing a sound and future-proof basis for direct electronic links between the Coal Authority and solicitors, other Internet users and the National Land Information Service (NLIS)
• facilitating higher volumes, in terms of systems capabilities and within contractual cost structures.

Solution

In a competitive bid, Capgemini won the contract to design, build and run MRSDS under Department of Trade and Industry PFI (Private Finance Initiative) arrangements. Capgemini would finance the initial investment, thereby absorbing the lion’s share of the risk involved as well as reducing strain on the UK’s public finances, and then be repaid on a long-term, per transaction basis.

The logical start was to develop a comprehensive understanding of current ways of working and a clear vision of detailed objectives of the Coal Authority. Following this, the Authority and Capgemini collaborated to develop an agreed change plan that met the ambitious new business requirements. At the heart of the plan was the need to leverage new technology so that the result was practical, reliable and cost-effective.

The next phase involved Capgemini working closely with the Authority’s in-house teams to design an overall systems architecture and assess, evaluate, select and integrate several technology components within the architecture. These included:

• a Geographical Information System (GIS) to turn the huge volumes of data (over 50 gigabytes of Ordnance Survey Landline data and around two million items of primary coal mining data) into an efficient format
• a Relational Database to enable the GIS to be searched with high speed and efficiency, and permit users to apply a variety of search criteria
• a Workflow System to ensure rapid turnaround of enquiries, with automatic compliance checks at every stage and prompts to ensure adherence to timetable on each individual piece of work
• the Workflow system had to include a new facility to record and cost every enquiry
• a Windows user-friendly front-end to replace the specialised, non-intuitive and unappealing monochrome screens previously used.

The MRSDS system was based on an adaptive architecture, and Capgemini leveraged its strategic alliances with partners such as IBM, Oracle, SUN and HP to ensure a solution that matched requirements.

The project used PRINCE - PRojects IN Controlled Environments - as the methodology, and was jointly managed and staffed by the Authority and Capgemini. Extensive two-way knowledge transfer was a permanent feature. The jointly staffed project organisation, steered by a Project Board, included three teams looking after specific phases - Design Analysis and Data Migration, Change Management, and Quality Assurance.

The project success led to the Coal Authority receiving the annual BCS IS Management Award. Here are some comments from senior Coal Authority officers at the awards ceremony:

” It was previously a “paperchase” system. This project has allowed us to combine all processes into one to give us a fast, accurate, cost-effective, high-volume service.”

“We now make better use of staff. With the previous system we had highly qualified technical staff doing the work. We now have staff more tied to things we need to do, and the ratio of non-technical to technical staff in this area is now 4:1.”
Mining Reports Manager

“When we started we had mainframe systems, Cobol and Fortran systems. With the millennium issues about to come up, the Coal Authority didn’t have the money to do the build or know-how to manage all the risks involved, so we put together the public finance initiative approach and used Capgemini, who understood the risks and the maturity of the business.”

“It is an incredible privilege to win this award, and it would not have been possible without the co-operation of quite an extensive team.”
IT Manager

At the same time, plans were enacted for Capgemini to deliver services for Infrastructure Management (IM) on the entire infrastructure supporting the Authority and Applications Management (AM) on MRSDS.

Leveraging a centre-based, remote delivery approach, services for IM commenced from Capgemini’s Centre of Excellence in Rotherham. Upon successful deployment of MRSDS, Capgemini commenced AM services on the application from its AMSC (Applications Management Service Centre) in Bristol.

Benefits

The new MRSDS system and its ongoing management on an outsourcing basis have met each and every objective set by the Coal Authority, providing a rare example of outstanding success in a PFI contract. Specifically:

• turnaround times have been reduced from 10 to 2 days in most cases, with a 24-hour service for email queries, fully in line with the objectives of the Coal Authority at inception
• costs have been significantly cut as a result of the improved efficiency of the new system, leading to a big reduction in wasteful clerical and manual effort. It has also helped the Authority to rationalise two sites into one, with further significant savings in location
• staff can be brought up to speed in a much shorter time. The integrated workflow, administration and GIS databases have removed the need for complex business process training; in effect, the expertise is designed into the system
• the savings have been passed on to customers, reducing the cost of a standard Mining Report by 25%
• customer satisfaction (formally measured at least annually) has risen to record levels, with 86.5% rating the Authority’s performance as “excellent” or “good” in key areas and less than 0.5% rating it as unsatisfactory. Some 71.5% rate the Authority as better than other information providers in the conveyancing process
• the project has demonstrated the commitment of the Coal Authority to customers and a determination to introduce modern techniques supported by investment in new technology
• the risk of systems failure has been greatly reduced by Capgemini’s failsafe procedures
• information that previously existed in a variety of paper and online systems, incapable of being effectively interrogated or analysed for its impact on any given single location, is now dynamically available via a single enquiry
• the complex technical environment and innovative requirements made it inevitable that obstacles would arise, but the excellent partnership forged from the start by the Coal Authority and Capgemini proved invaluable in overcoming these obstacles and was a key factor in the very successful implementation
• the new system has handled a 90% expansion in volumes with less than pro-rata staff increases
• a major improvement in an important public service has been effected without imposing any unnecessary burden on public spending.

Senior managers at the Coal Authority, delighted with results so far, have agreed to a new contract with Capgemini to extend the service for another 8 years and provide additional development. The transformational agreement will facilitate significant expansion and allow the Coal Authority to provide new services linked to property purchases.

Written in co-operation with the Coal Authority