FSA streamlines dairy farm inspections
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has begun using digital writing technology rather than laptops for dairy farm inspections, as part of a drive to streamline processes and reduce costs.
FSA inspectors carry out dairy hygiene visits to 3,000 farms in the UK to ensure the raw milk supply is not contaminated by bacteria and other substances which could be harmful to humans.
Previously, the agency says its dairy hygiene inspectors used a paper-based form, which was then typed into a spreadsheet and emailed to the central support team.
The team would then process each email sent, upload the information to the database and post a copy of the form to the farmer.
The FSA says it wanted to address particular challenges within the process, such as the length of time spent on the process (around five days per farm inspected), data duplication and the fact that the inspection team had to carry laptops and forms.
David Brown, reporting and interface manager at the FSA, says: "We experienced that our process of gathering information from the farmers was time consuming and often the farmer had to wait a number of days before receiving a copy of his forms.
“We wanted to implement a system that would allow us to transmit information from the field without duplicating data, and leave farmers with their copy of the form as opposed to posting it.”
After reviewing the use of laptops and tablet devices for inspections, Mr Brown said: "We were up against the same problem that we could not leave a copy with the farm without providing printers for the inspectors, which would have increased our CAPEX and OPEX costs."
As a result, Anoto digital writing technology has been implemented. Anoto Group AB offers digital writing solutions to transmit handwriting into a digital format.
Mr Brown says that the new technology has now completely replaced the use of laptops in FSA dairy farm inspections, streamlining the process, which now reportedly takes five minutes per farm as opposed to five days.
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