DevoteamInsightsNHS Test & Trace – Enhancing Scalability with MuleSoft

NHS Test & Trace – Enhancing Scalability with MuleSoft

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The challenge

Winter 2020, the novel Coronavirus has spread across the UK, hospitalising nearly one million people, impacting the economy and putting one-quarter of all employees on government furlough. The mishandling of our test and trace infrastructure has led to government scrutiny and low confidence in public health policies.

The solution

Devoteam was engaged by the Department of Health and Social Care to “modernise their Lateral Flow Test supply chain using MuleSoft”. Moving the process of delivering tests away from a collection of systems, manual integrations and manually maintained spreadsheets and into an automated system.

How we started

1

No stated requirements or Architecture. All processes and functions run on manual excel formula and emailed spreadsheets with demand for test doubling weekly.

2

Multiple delivery partners in various stages of maturity within the solution delivery and operational organisation

3

Introducing a new technology with no path to Live into the Test Supply Chain (TSC) area. EU Development Resource on a UK Onshore contract.

What We Did

  • Identifying areas of most pain for the client
  • Building strong relationships with delivery partners and process stakeholders.
  • Broadening area of delivery and accepting tactical bridges
  • Advised on Agile Ways-of-Working across the program to improve visibility, reporting and efficiencies using the implemented tools.
  • Delivering an MVP integration that made it possible for the allocations team to function at a greater capacity [tactical]
  • Expanding the Mulesoft estate into new areas of the business [strategic]
  • Recommending the use of new technologies within the clients’ existing service agreements

Outcomes

  • Landscape of test and trace altered, as is the supply chain and relationship with many end-point warehouses.
  • Fully onshore Mulesoft team as part of S Platform.
  • Automated end-to-end processing of test kit requests from order creation to order management and shipping.
  • Excel is only used for edge cases or to alleviate problems with other system components.
  • Demand for tests ramped down dramatically and Devoteam solutions have been deemed robust enough for there to be no managed support “tail” to the contract.
  • Working on the final automation of warehouse integrations, data integrity and conversion of PCR tests into the existing systems.
  • Order capacity creation ceiling from 10,000 per week to 10,000 per 30 minutes.

Test and Trace is no longer rooms full of people emailing ad hoc excel sheets to one another. An end-to-end solution is in place for each piece of the supply chain, and this can be iterated on to improve functionality as required.

Products can be tracked and identified from the manufacturers in China to the test tube that confirms the result in the UK.

Devoteam is considered the “gold standard” for code management, release processes, documentation, finance reporting and Jira utilisation within NHS Tu0026T.

Find out how our teams can help your organisation

Whether considering a new technology, or looking to embed practice and processes around what you already have, Devoteam can help. Contact us here to talk through your challenges.

See more Success Stories here.