Themes - tpximpact/f4-fsa-field-ops-discoveries-overview GitHub Wiki

Field Ops carries out official controls activities as the Competent Authority for food safety across the meat, dairy and wine sectors in England & Wales.

The discoveries conducted find that inspection services are fundamentally the same, but operationally divergent. Some differences are to be expected because of variations across sectors (at an industry, policy and legislative level). However, other factors, including the historical evolution of the Food Standards Agency - originating in meat hygiene standards, before absorbing raw milk and wine oversight duties - have resulted in further operational complications that undermine the opportunity for consistent and efficient service delivery.

Operational Mission

Delivery of official controls is underpinned by two fundamental operational priorities that enable the Food We Can Trust mission:

  • Resourcing - getting the right people to the right place at the right time. Food safety and animal welfare is a physical endeavour, that needs people on the ground in physical locations observing live stock processing. Efficient logistical coordination is necessary across teams within the FSA (as staff are shared across food domains) and critically with the service delivery partner (who provide over half of the frontline workforce).
  • Intelligence - capturing and communicating reliable data first time.
    Inspections is an information management and communication challenge. Good information collected by Field Ops is required to enable the resourcing effort, but is also necessary to recover costs, prioritise segmented interventions, demonstrative authority competence, deliver transparent compliance assurance and respond efficiently to national disease risks.

Themes

These efforts are variously hindered at all stages of inspections service lifecycle (from approval through to offboarding), characterised by these challenging themes:

  • Fragmented - multiple actors and systems are involved across department silos (as well as critical third parties), which requires a high coordination effort to avoid duplication and ensure consistent intelligence sharing and use.
  • Fractured - there is no clear single point of view for interactions, outcomes and decisions between the FSA and the food business operators it is responsible for overseeing.
  • Isolated - teams and the frontline workforce are split, and the most critical tools they use to get the job done are disparate and disconnected.
  • Manual - routine tasks take longer as a result of manual data processing (including capture, input, checking and transposing to other systems), which leads to inherently error prone processes.
  • Pressured - internal and external actors are time-poor, processes are time-consuming, and deadlines are set with compressed timeframes.
  • Misvalued - almost by necessity of the above, the immediate inspection needs are prioritised over the big picture mission.

The overall impression is a service that is delivered almost despite itself and against a background of fighting

Dimensions

These common challenges can be observed in a range of dimensions across inspections domains that will affect the continuous improvement of Field Operations.

Cultural

The historical legacy of how the Food Standards Agency has increased its scope from meat inspections influences how staff behave and teams operate.

Inspection Team Leaders are empowered to manage resourcing at a cluster level. Local innovation and problem solving flourishes as peer networks support each other - personal connections can be effective in getting things done. This comes at the expense of a national and service-wide approach to inspections delivery. Logistics patterns are more complicated as a result, and service delivery (including the food business operators experience) is inconsistent.

Despite the Manual of Official Controls, guidance is neither common or clear. Staff and contractor onboarding is inconsistent. Frontline practice is evolved and handed down locally.

Technology

There are many moving parts to juggle, but fundamentally there are commonalities across domains, and each seeks to do fairly routine activities that are well solved problems. Increased complication in how services are actually delivered compounds service complexity and masks service simplicity. This in turn confounds a common systems approach.

Teams employ a disparate collection of tools and practices surrounding them. Usage is inconsistent, and leads to manually compensating for perceived system deficiencies. Localised tools that are not centrally managed or supported - such as rota spreadsheets - don’t scale well for a national service.

Frontline staff and managers rely on ‘off-system’ data points - information that is observed fleetingly or captured manually and which bypasses direct entry into FSA systems, such as provenance and animal condition data, as well as inspection and audit observations. Contributing factors include the operating environments, application support and connectivity. This undermines the intelligent re-use of data.

There is significant manual effort to do simple things that could be automated. Compounded by the aforementioned lack of data re-use, systems fall short of intelligent business rule modelling, and where these can’t be readily accommodated, suffer from poor usability.

Operational

Time pressures and pinch points framed by FSA timelines (such as the charging cycle for meat plant inspection) and the pace and time-sensitivity of FBO operations (driven by commercial and market factors) are exacerbated by the level of manual effort needed.

Inspection planning is reactive by nature - whether at the level of contingency planning for resourcing issues (such as unplanned absence), or the imperative to respond to non-compliances and publicly reported breach allegations. Information needed about operators and their operations and history is typically spread out across systems and file repositories, and sometimes held by different stakeholder partners. This dispersed information results in partial context and visibility to support decision making across the agency and supply chain, diminishing responsiveness.

Impacts and dependencies of data verification and transmission (from food chain information to timesheeting codes) are not well-defined and clearly communicated, undermining a shared understanding of the FSA mission and the role Field Ops has in delivering it. This is manifest within the FSA, within Field Ops, and across service partners.