Securing Australian Export Growth through Intelligent Regulation

70% of Australia’s agricultural produce is exported. The government is making a generational investment in trade reform, making it easier for producers and exporters to get their goods to overseas markets. A more streamlined export experience enabled by new and connected digital systems will support the industry’s goal to reach $100 billion farm gate output by 2030. Tobias was engaged to identify and address opportunities to remove obstacles and improve service delivery, focusing particularly on regulatory compliance oversight.

Tobias partnered with the department to build new digital compliance management tools. We worked closely with stakeholders to understand what success looks like for different actors in the ecosystem; their needs, tasks and pain points. Stakeholders worked with us to co-create digital tools that generate benefits across the supply chain. Multiple concepts were tested before a two-part solution was formed: 1.Compliance Capture: a responsive digital application for department officers to record inspection observations and regulatory decisions. 2.Compliance Insights: a new digital dashboard that aggregates compliance data to provide a clear overview of exporter performance and risks.

Replacing manual processes with automated data aggregation and analysis is a critical precursor for risk-based regulation, where consistently well-performing exporters in future, will benefit from less frequent demands to prove their compliance and incur lower costs. Data capture is streamlined and structured to support efficient reporting of consignment inspection outcomes and make it available for use in smarter, productive ways. An intelligent data aggregation tool allows staff to view historical non-compliance trends quickly and easily, helping them better identify risky exporting practices, and intervening well before issues might disrupt trade to valuable overseas markets.

Compliance Capture: Digitises manual processes for integrity and efficiency ●Connects internal systems to auto-populate data for efficiency and data integrity, increases consistency by replacing free text fields with options and drop-downs and integrates photos into the workflow. ●Captures valuable non-compliance data that indicates points of risk in exporter processes. ●Continuous interface improvements informed by extensive field testing with tight user feedback loops. ●Responsive design supports mobile users Compliance Insights: Aggregates data insights for informed decision making ●Designed for user-specific contexts by understanding the data different departmental staff need to see to get their job done and aggregating it from disparate systems. For example, a veterinary officer preparing for an inspection will view different data sets, than an auditor preparing to audit an exporter’s systems. ●Generates aggregated data analyses and visualisations in a matter of seconds that previously took hours of manually copying data from multiple sources. ●Delivers departmental time savings as cost savings to exporters. ●Enables staff to identify systemic problems more readily by viewing an exporter’s compliance history and proactively working with them to address risks before they disrupt trade.