Mar 24th, 2021
8 mins
The BFFF have received the following communication from Defra about the opportunity for technology specialists to work with Defra on digital solutions to support movements of food from Great Britain (GB) to Northern Ireland (NI):
Defra has been working with a broad range of businesses to establish the critical challenges presented by the process of moving agri-food goods from Great Britain (GB) to Northern Ireland (NI). This process currently involves several different IT systems, high levels of paper documentation and substantial rekeying of information.
To simplify this process, Defra and DAERA – our counterparts in Northern Ireland – have introduced the Digital Assistance Scheme (DAS). DAS aims to support the continued movement of agri-food goods from Great Britain to Northern Ireland by digitising the certification and verification processes required to move these goods.
Recently, we completed a series of workshops with 140 agri-food traders and trade associations to understand their requirements and priorities for a digital solution. You can find out more about these workshops later in this message.
The feedback from this work forms the foundation of the design work for the digital solution, and we now want to work closely with technology departments and specialists within businesses on the development phase.
Why we’re contacting you:
We want to share the findings from the workshops with businesses and their technology departments at a technical briefing session.
We believe this presents an opportunity for businesses to be involved in the design and delivery of a flagship digitisation project for an industry worth some £2.1bn pa (GB supply to NI) involving a vast range of retailers, suppliers, producers and manufacturers.
Who should attend the technical briefing session?
This session is targeted at in-house technology specialists within the agri-food sector and external technology providers who have experience in building or providing solutions to support suppliers, retailers and Traders who engage with agri-food supply chain.
What will the technical briefing session cover?
We will provide further information on how we aim to collaborate with the technology community on the technical design and the accelerated development of digital solutions.
At the technical briefing sessions, we will:
- Provide an overview of the DAS programme
- Share the findings from our previous engagements used to build the design of the digital solution
- Outline the potential tools and services that are and will need to be developed based on feedback from agri-food traders
- Explain the next steps for getting involved and the support available to you.
How to join the briefing sessions
We will be running online technical briefing sessions via zoom. The 60-minute sessions are open to any trader or technology provider, and places will be offered on a first-come, first-served basis. You can sign up for a briefing session by clicking on one of the links below.
- Briefing Session 1: Tuesday, 30 March – 2 – 3pm, click here to register
- Briefing Session 2: Thursday, 1 April – 2 – 3pm, click here to register
What will follow the briefing session?
We will be looking for organisations to participate in further technical discussions to help identify and design solutions for industry, and to participate in the testing of early implementations. We are intent on incentivising the development and uptake of technology solutions which we believe will be a sustaining element of ongoing GB-NI trade. There are two strands to this technical engagement:
- Additional user research and collaborative design on supply chain data sharing
- Testing the API for EHC Online to support Export Health Certificates
Review and comment on the recent trader workshops
We mentioned that we recently completed a series of workshops with agri-food traders and trade associations. We wanted to thank everyone who attended and provided such useful insight and feedback, which has enabled us to make such good progress with the DAS design.
As promised, we’ve now published the slides and narrative we used, along with a recorded version of the presentation.
If you couldn’t attend the workshops, you can still provide feedback and comments on the work we’re doing around DAS by reviewing the content on our GB-NI Trader Showcase site.
Take a look at the video, slides and narrative used for the workshops and follow the link published on the site to the survey where you can leave your feedback. You can continue to leave your feedback until Tuesday, 30 March 2021.
Finally, we would like to thank you for your interest, and we look forward to discussing this work with you. If you have any questions about the information in this message, please email us at das@defra.gov.uk.
