PSD

The Pesticides Safety Directorate Eradicates Inefficiency with Actian Ingres Database

Highlights

With the health and safety of millions of people on the line, the Pesticides Safety Directorate of the United Kingdom leaves nothing to chance. The agency relies on Ingres technology to make sure its work gets done on time and under budget, from end-to-end electronic workflows that expedite the approval of new pesticide products to open source development tools that speed new applications to market. Rapid ROI is only part of the story. For growers and consumers of UK agricultural products worldwide, Ingres reliability and robustness behind the scenes help ensure safety at the table.

Challenge

Efficiency is paramount for the Pesticides Safety Directorate (PSD), an executive agency of the UK Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs. The organization’s mission encompasses ensuring the safety, effectiveness, and regulatory compliance of plant protection products used by both industry and amateur gardeners; regulating a market worth around £450 million in the UK and a similar figure in overseas exports; and shaping UK policies on pesticide issues – all with a staff of only 200. Needless to say, technology plays a vital role in making this possible.

“IT is central to the organization. It is the backbone of everything that we do,” says Andrew Park, the agency’s IS Project Manager. This extends from serving PSD’s website to the development of new applications to streamline the agency’s work. Most recently, Park’s group was called on to deliver a particularly high-profile project – enabling the electronic delivery of all services, followed by the introduction of a complete, end-to-end electronic workflow for the entire new product application and approval process.

In spite of the initiative’s visionary scope, its costs would need to remain firmly rooted in reality. “We have to be careful about what we spend because we don’t have an unlimited budget,” says Park. “As a full cost recovery organization, value is extremely important to us, as is the flexibility to change as business changes.”

Solution

PSD’s database technology of choice is Ingres Database, the leading open source database for business-critical applications. “We’ve never seen a reason to change our choice of Ingres as our strategic database. We’ve always been happy with it,” says Park. Today, PSD runs Ingres Database on Windows 2003, where it services tens of thousands of internal queries and serves between 300,000 and 500,000 Web pages each month.

Ingres has earned PSD’s loyalty through its reliability and robustness. For its latest initiatives, the flexibility of Ingres Database, combined with the OpenROAD open source application development environment, provide a cost-effective platform to deliver new capabilities.

Results

With the help of Ingres, Park and his colleagues delivered the fully electronic and secure signing of license documents on time and under budget – and were even shortlisted for a national IT award. The process takes place entirely within Ingres, through a Web front end built in Ingres OpenROAD. The results have been dramatic, with reduced paperwork, improved efficiency, and significant reductions in time and costs. Park is understandably proud of the achievement. “It took us a year to develop from scratch, using Ingres and OpenROAD, but made us direct savings of £100,000 immediately in the first two years and effectively paid for itself.”

In the next phase of the project, Park’s group will digitize the completion and submission of product applications – a process which now involves incoming paper forms being manually logged into the Ingres-based system. “Smart application specialists here will build the approval documents and they’ll be put in the system for companies to download and submit securely,” says Park. To convert the present paper forms into XML format for the new system, PSD will link its Ingres database to the Web 2.0-ready XForms electronic forms model – an illustration of the way Ingres support for open source plays into PSD’s growing open source orientation.

We want to reduce our dependency on Microsoft,” says Park. “Now we’re looking at Linux running under Ingres and it just doesn’t break, it’s virtually bombproof.” He also likes the community feel that is part and parcel of open source, citing the Ingres experience as an example. “We really enjoy the enthusiasm of all the people we meet in the Ingres user community. And the technical support from the company has always been great, the people there are all real Ingres aficionados. But to be honest there haven’t been many things we’ve come across that we couldn’t fix by simply going to the user community on the Web.”