Finance
A number of business process reviews have been undertaken during the year to improve the efficiency and quality of the unit’s services and to monitor the control of costs. The benefits of these reviews has been to provide a faster and higher level of accounting information and a reduction in paperwork due to electronic transfer of data.

Customer Accounts and Programme Support
The unit provided administrative support to the VLA Science Programmes and Science Directors. It also acted as a central contact point for Defra customers to provide them with both financial and contractual information.
A customer satisfaction survey was carried out in the year to gauge our Defra customer perceptions of VLA services. Improvement targets have been agreed for 2003/04.

Purchasing & Supply
The unit is responsible for procurement within the Agency and negotiated an improved framework for the servicing and calibration of equipment to support VLA’s external quality accreditation.

Checking stock in the refurbished warehouse facilities at VLA Weybridge

The focus during the year has been to improve the efficiency and capacity of the unit by the refurbishment of its warehouse facilities, automation of routine procedures, broadening the contractual support to VLA’s collaborators and the completion of a classified system to support future initiatives in the e-procurement area. Assembly and distribution of a large number of sampling kits and the transportation of specimens from abattoirs to Regional Laboratories was also carried out in support of a national TSE survey.

Loading bar coded samples into the BES robot

Information Technology
Developments over the past year have been driven by the aftermath of the FMD outbreak and the realisation of the need for better integration of any new IT systems with VLA’s local management information systems. Project Zoo, an
on-going project to support statutory surveillance of Salmonella, highlighted this need by identifying that better customer reporting was necessary and has driven the increasing use of the ThermoLabs SampleManager software. Development of these systems enabled the effective delivery of the Scrapie Abattoir Survey and projects on food-borne pathogens and TSE database rationalisation. The implementation of a Brucella Eradication Scheme (BES) robot project, helped streamline the testing of BES samples.

The Agency’s IT infrastructure was also improved during the year by upgrading the local network servers and storage capacity and integrating a Bioinformatics network. This forward looking strategy will also, in conjuction with Epidemiology and Defra colleagues, consider moving to the latest Microsoft.NET application development environment.