We provided critical application support for the RPA's live systems to support the inspection of cattle and delivering essential maintenance services.
The Rural Payments Agency (RPA) is sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), and they play a crucial role in supporting agricultural and rural communities in England. Each year, they manage over £2 billion in payments
to support farmers, traders, landowners, and Natural England through various schemes and financial aid. This ensures the sustained development of rural communities.
The RPA is dedicated to fostering sustainable and profitable farming while enhancing the quality of life in agricultural and rural communities. By supporting agriculture, driving innovation, facilitating community activities and delivering economic growth
and environmental sustainability, the RPA plays a pivotal role in creating vibrant rural areas. Sopra Steria has partnered with the RPA since 2007, providing critical application support and maintenance for their live systems to support the inspection
of cattle and delivering essential maintenance services.
Challenge:
The RPA’s strategic application outsource objectives involve:
- maintaining current service levels,
- reducing costs,
- retaining system knowledge, and
- managing support team overheads.
They wanted to partner with a supplier capable of rapidly scaling resources, retaining staff knowledge, and sharing the risk of maintaining applications.
Managing knowledge was a significant challenge for the RPA, particularly given their reliance on legacy applications which require specialist knowledge. As we had worked with the RPA since 2007, we had specialist knowledge of the applications and systems
used and were therefore best placed to support the project. These skills are hard to find in the marketplace and would be expensive to source if available. The RPA’s complex and critical operations, including managing over 40 different schemes
and conducting over 23,000 manual inspections can present further challenges for the RPA. The challenges the RPA faced include maintaining service levels, reducing costs, preserving knowledge, managing legacy systems, and ensuring scalability of resources.
Solution:
Sopra Steria has provided a managed service to the RPA since 2007 to present. We adopted a strategic approach to address the challenges faced by the RPA, focusing on robust knowledge management and the deployment of skilled resources. We ensured seamless
knowledge transfer within the team, providing a stable and reliable solution that consistently met the RPA's service levels and requirements.
The comprehensive support provided encompassed:
- Application support,
- incident and problem resolution,
- user and service manager guidance within Defra RPA,
- impact assessments for changes,
- extensive testing (including interface, system, volume, stress, and UAT), and
- meticulous maintenance of application documentation.
Minor changes were made based on authorised request for changes (RFCs), while major projects underwent thorough impact analysis, requirements specification, and project definition, with implementation subject to written agreement. Managed through Sopra
Steria’s Government Shared Services (GSS) capability, the shared resources model offered cost efficiency, flexibility, and enhanced knowledge retention. Team members worked part-time across multiple accounts, fostering a collaborative environment
that actively promoted continuous improvement. Recent initiatives have enhanced system performance and improved online response times.
Results and benefits:
Sopra Steria consistently met green service levels and maintained high customer satisfaction. Our support and advisory services resulted in lower call volumes over the years. By consistently meeting SLA targets, we ensured uninterrupted service delivery
to agricultural communities. Additionally, effective knowledge management and seamless resource scaling further enhanced the reliability and support provided to clients.
As a result of our outstanding customer service, the Rural Payments Agency awarded Sopra Steria a high Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 10 at the end of Q4 2022. The support covered various legacy systems, primarily categorised under Trader Systems, alongside
Managed Gateway and IMIS, further demonstrating their comprehensive service capabilities.
Read more about our Environment and Agriculture solutions.