Industry: Government | Product: Adobe LiveCycle Designer | Adobe LiveCycle Reader Extensions
As Australia’s first completely integrated food agency, the NSW Food Authority’s has a mission to ensure that food in NSW is safe and correctly labelled and that NSW consumers are able to make informed choices about the food they eat. As such a key function of the Food Authority is the completion of inspections of food premises – Restaurants, Take Away Food Outlets, Delis, Grocery Stores, etc.
Previously, the Food Authority carried out these inspections through mobile inspectors who were using paper forms to complete the job in hand. This essentially caused delays and created unnecessary costs when processing the data of the paper forms.
NSW Food wanted to improve the process for completing inspections and, subsequently, for processing the information collected during inspections. This information is used to issue warnings and fines to organisations in breach of the Food Authority’s regulations - included in this process is the updating of a “Name and Shame” register on the Food Authority’s web site that provides a list of non-compliant businesses to residents.
As well as improving the efficiency of the mobile inspectors and of the Food Authority as a whole, improvement of processes drives greater compliance and allows NSW residents to make informed decisions about the food outlets they purchase from.
In order to make the inspection process work effectively for the NSW Food Authority, the inspection form needed to be easy to complete on site regardless of whether the worker was connected or disconnected from the internet, and to support electronic submission when network connectivity was available.
Additionally the data from the form needed to be easily used in the NSW Food Authority’s existing systems so as to update the web site, issue fines and collect notifications from the State Revenue Office when a fine had been paid.
Following attending an Avoka seminar focused on NSW Government which featured a presentation on a solution built for the NSW Department of Housing who had implemented a property inspection form using Adobe LiveCycle and Ultra-Mobile tablet-style PCs, the Food Authority investigated the option of an Avoka solution.
The Avoka offering was the right one for NSW Food Authority for several key reasons: the ability to have an online and offline working system; the output of the form was PDF and XML which are easily processed document/file standards; PDF was already a familiar format within their processes; it was a simple deployment for the tablet PC because only Adobe Reader was required.
And the user experience is simple and clean – the mobile inspector opens the Food Premise Inspection Form on the field worker’s computer or device, and then the inspection findings can be recorded within an interactive PDF.
As the user works through the form it is automatically saved at different intervals, and again when the form is complete. The form is saved locally when there is no network connection and submitted once reconnected. As such, the inspector can complete several inspections throughout the day and then submit at the end of their work.
The form once connected to the network, speaks to the Food Authority’s internal, pre-existing data systems which means the form automatically uploads any necessary data prior to the inspection, and then updates with all new data following submission of the form after inspection.
Reader Extensions allow the form to locally save with the data, and data is submitted from the form as XML through the Web Service capability of the Reader Extended Form. This XML data is then integrated directly into the data systems within NSW Food Authority. Additionally, a read only PDF copy of the inspection findings are stored in their TRIM document management system.
All of these key functionalities allow the removal of paper forms and this, combined with associated rekeying of data allows the Food Inspectors to complete more inspections in a single day – thereby increasing the quality of food outlets through greater compliance.
Moreover, data accuracy is improved and rework due to poor data (missing / illegible / etc) is removed.
This is good news for all NSW consumers too – all these improvements to the process eventuate in increased quality of produce in food outlets and therefore a greater health provision.
Ongoing Adobe LiveCycle has already been deployed in another area of NSW Food Authority business – they are utilising LiveCycle to automatically produce PDF Certificates for employees of food businesses that complete certification courses.
