The most valuable suppliers focus on outcomes and benefits rather than just outputs, and collaborate with our in-house teams in an open and transparent way whilst holding themselves accountable to their deliverables. Shout fits that bill perfectly. For over three years, they have quietly and competently supported the Payment Practices Reporting service such that it just ‘works.
Innovation Culture Lead
Dept. for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy
50,000 reports filed
8,000+ business reporting
Continuous improvement
Phase 1
The challenge
Under 2017 legislation on payment practices and performance, it was estimated that over 15,000 large businesses must report on their payment practices. The Department for Business & Trade (DBT) commissioned a new Payment Practices Reporting service, to support three diverse user communities:
- Large businesses submitting prompt payment compliance reports
- Suppliers (including small businesses) – checking prompt payment reliability metrics
- Analysts reviewing overall legislation compliance, trends and issues
Having developed an initial iteration of the service internally, DBT required an experienced partner to adopt the service, develop and iterate it through to Live, and ensure it met with the Technology Code of Practice (TCoP) and Government Digital Service (GDS) Service Standard - a search on G-Cloud led DBT to appoint Shout.
Phase 2
The approach
Project Adoption & Technical Audit
When adopting an early-stage service, we start by running a full technical audit and producing an audit report. This creates a clear baseline and sets expectations accurately to set the project up for success. A thorough review of Agile practices, documentation, Scala code, performance and security revealed a fundamental platform issue – it had been implemented on the Heroku cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) rather than best practice public cloud, as dictated by TCoP.
Platform Migration
Moving to best practice public cloud hosting became the project's priority during Public Beta. The Shout team created a detailed plan to avoid operational disruption and completed the migration out-of-hours, successfully maintaining full report and data integrity. The migration led to a low-key, smooth transition to Live.
Continual Improvements
In Live, we continue to maintain and enhance the service to deliver ongoing improvements. One notable innovation was implementing the first integration with a new authentication mechanism developed by Companies House, enabling users to submit artefacts to prove they genuinely represent the company they are using the service on behalf of.
Another significant improvement addressed the process for companies to correct errors in submitted reports. Initially, DBT anticipated this would be rare and agreed to a manual process: users would flag errors via the service, DBT would instruct us to remove the report, and the company would then resubmit. However, the volume of corrections was far higher than expected. To resolve this, we developed a lightweight NodeJS archiving tool that enabled the DBT Payment Practices Policy Team to manage report removals themselves, reducing friction and improving operational efficiency.
(Shout) have quietly and competently supported the Payment Practices Reporting service such that it just ‘works.’ User adoption has been high in all three categories and the service is underpinning important supplier assessments by public sector buyers and other organisations across the country.
Shout is a valued Small and Medium Enterprise, with this engagement also boosting enterprise and showcasing the UK as one of the best places in the world to start and grow a business.
Innovation Culture Lead
Dept. for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy
Phase 3
The outcome
Since engaging us to develop and manage the Payment Practices Reporting service, DBT has been supported by a reliable and consistent partner. Our comprehensive initial audit report gave stakeholders confidence that Shout had the necessary technical capability and the business acumen to maintain a robust service, complying with all aspects of TCoP and GDS.
Working with Shout has saved DBT time and effort; with the archive self-service feature alone meaning the Policy Team can do in a few clicks what used to take days.
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