Pathway 3 Cost Efficiency - tpximpact/f4-fsa-field-ops-discoveries-overview GitHub Wiki
Pathway Summary
Goal
- Understanding bottom line impacts of operations
Recommendations
Strategic Alignment
This pathway aligns with the following Ops Transformation Seven Elements of the future delivery model.
- Shared accountability between industry and the FSA
- Tailored inspection regime
- Modernised management
Recommendations
Stop meat plant advisory visits
Food business operators can request an advisory visit to support an application for approval as a meat plant establishment. Since 2019 the FSA has levied a charge of £362.88. Since March 2020 there have been only 5 visits made.
- There is an operational and resourcing overhead for maintaining the service offer (even if unused), and for managing, delivering and following up visits.
- The real total cost of visit provision is unlikely to be met by the current charging level.
- Business demand is low, and the need can be met by industry group bodies and professionals (in line with the Shared Accountability principle for the future operating model)
It is therefore recommended to stop offering the advisory service even as a chargeable service in order to focus resourcing on in-life inspection services.
Goals
- Eliminate service distraction
- Alleviate resource allocation pressures
- Open up space for industry
Steps
- Carry out risk and loss assessments
- what does the FSA lose by not doing advisory visits?
- Identify routes to compensate for lost insight
- how else can the FSA gain the insights lost by not doing advisory visits
- Communicate decision and opportunity to meat industry groups
- Update website and application guidance
- Simplify approval and related charging processes
Assess full cost of charging
The process of cost recovery, particularly for official controls conducted at meat plants, adds a lot of complication and overhead to the delivery of inspection cycles, including
- additional processing steps for inspectors and vets
- additional checks and follow-ups for supervisors
- configuration and maintenance of legacy systems
- dispute handling for Finance teams
The charging cycle also creates weekly and monthly pressure points in order to meet internal operating deadlines and external service levels.
The activities required for cost recovery are not key value-adding activities, in that they do not directly contribute to the inspections service value stream. By contrast, they are cumbersome, generating significant operational overhead and introducing risk to the relationship between the FSA and food business operators. As the burden of responsibility for food safety mission is re-balanced in favour of making FBOs more accountable, the value of the FSA’s contribution comes under greater scrutiny.
The recommendation is to review the true operational cost of the current charging model. This will underpin a sound and robust review of the charging options that are open to the FSA after EU Exit.
Related: This recommendation builds on clearly defined process measurement points and outcomes, and should be understood in the context of both activity logging and stopping advisory visits.
Goal
- Understand how the current charging basis impacts non-value operational activities
Steps
- Carry out full operational cost analysis of current charging model, including cost of
- Systems maintenance
- Re-work
- Supervisor administration
- Fielding FBO challenges
- Invoice processing
- Finance handling
- Map to value proposition and key activities
- Feed analysis into charging policy review