Digital transformation of a data-driven service for freight being handled by all UK sea ports

The maritime sector is essential to the UK economy, contributing at least £13billion each year. With around 95% of UK imported and exported goods transported by sea (including approximately 40% of our food and about one quarter of our energy, it is clear that our island nation has a huge reliance on the shipping industry. On top of this, an estimated 23,000 UK nationals were seafarers working regularly at sea in 2015, whilst UK ports handled almost 500 million tonnes of freight in 2015 - this includes large quantities of goods from high value sectors, for example, 130 million tonnes of bulk fuels and 9 million tonnes of agricultural goods were brought into the UK in 2015. It is therefore important that there is an accurate data collection system in place to monitor the volume of goods shipped into and out of the UK as there is a wide range of users reliant on such data. The DfT and the Maritime arms length bodies has a requirement to report UK Port Freight Statistics to the European Commission, which requires comparable, reliable, synchronised and regular statistical data on the scale and development of the carriage of goods and passengers by sea. To meet this requirement, manual processes needed reviewing where a Discovery outlined pain-points in the process that included providing accurate reporting.

The data that is analysed and provided to the end user consists of port freight data of ports, shipping lines and shipping agents inputted by various sources, and formats (such as CSV or XML). Our multi-disciplinary team embedded as a partner with the internal business analyst and service owner who were the Maritime subject-matter-experts. Using the GDS style guide and frontend toolkit, our development team delivered a prototype, user testing the submission process with ports and the internal system with Maritime colleagues/statisticians. Satisfying the requirements of Alpha, an extract-transform-load process was developed to input and validate data into a cloud platform (Google Cloud) as part of the wider statistics service. Continuous improvements were made as part of an Agile delivery lifecycle to ensure the customer can use this data to analyse trends, and patterns to aid policy decisions.

The service was deployed within a year passing Discovery, Alpha, Private Beta and Public Beta GDS assessments - meeting governance & assurance gateway requirements. This service is publicly available and records a minimum of 817 million tonnes of goods per year.