The previous system was frustrating and time-consuming for thousands of suppliers
We worked with the Crown Commercial Service to create a new management information system and make life easier for public sector suppliers
The Crown Commercial Service (CCS) is the owner of a large number of commercial frameworks that enable public sector organisations to buy services and products from approved suppliers.
Every year, the public sector spends almost £25bn through these frameworks. CCS asked us to replace a business critical reporting system used to track this spend and calculate the framework fees that fund the service.
The legacy system – ‘Management Information System Online’ (MISO) – routinely failed during the monthly peak of the reporting cycle. This made life difficult for suppliers, as well as causing reputational damage to CCS and putting their ability to collect fees at risk.
Outcome
We replaced MISO with RMI
MISO was at the end of its life and couldn’t be iterated to meet changing needs. So we worked with CCS to create a completely new system – the Report Management Information service (RMI)
The new service supports over 6,000 suppliers reporting millions of lines of government spend concurrently, validates the data reported, and pushes it in different formats to CCS’s finance systems and data warehouse, supporting the creation of correct invoices and data analysis.
Suppliers can upload spreadsheets of their invoices and the system provides user friendly ‘error messages’ if there are any issues when their information is validated.
“The MI service is a poster child of a good commercial project handed over to the government. Its architecture is simple, well maintained and effective.”
CCS Report 2024
What we did
We led the project from discovery to live with a full multidisciplinary team.
Understanding needs and pain points
In discovery, we analysed data from MISO to get more of an understanding of how people were using the system and what their pain points were.
Error messages were a particular problem for suppliers. If something in a supplier’s upload didn’t meet validation requirements, the notification they received wasn’t clear about what action they needed to take. The old system also asked suppliers for numerous pieces of information, which had to pass strict validation, but were never used.
We used service design to situate the service within CCS’s ecosystem, and co-designed data collection with subject matter experts who need to analyse the data to make decisions.
Building a service to handle significant scale
We developed our prototypes into working software within weeks, leading regular research with different users of the service and iterating based on what we learned.
The technical architecture was built with both scale and value for money in mind. We used well-tested GDS design patterns and standards for the front-end and integrated with the GOV.UK Notify messaging platform.
We also integrated directly with other CCS applications to extend the service’s functionality. With simple architecture and well-documented applications to build sustainability for the future.
Getting the service live
Over the course of the project, we onboarded 23 frameworks to the new RMI system with the team at CCS. Making sure they were able to onboard new frameworks themselves using their own in-house technical capability.
We also established CCS’s support function for the service, providing training for 1st, 2nd and 3rd line support teams.