Land Registry Transforms Data Decoding and Report Generation Process with SAS®

Land Registry is using SAS® to decode data and to generate statistics and reports, detailing the performance of its mainframe computer system. The automated approach delivers major time savings and a significant reduction in the likelihood of errors occurring.

Established in 1862, Land Registry is responsible for maintaining a register of land ownership in England and Wales. With the largest transactional property database of its kind, Land Registry underpins the economy by safeguarding ownership of many billions of pounds worth of property and provides essential information and services to business customers and members of the public.  It is also at the forefront of developing and implementing major technological improvements to conveyancing processes in England and Wales.

Scoping the Challenge
There is a key requirement for Land Registry to decode data from its mainframe computers as a prerequisite to developing reports and analysing the performance of its systems.  Historically, much of this work was time-consuming for the organisation’s small in-house IT performance team. As online services were rolled out the amount of data to be processed grew significantly and the team became increasingly concerned with the amount of time spent extracting and analysing data manually.

The team decided that by automating the process it could potentially achieve a broad range of benefits. Above all, automation would reduce the time spent extracting and processing the data whilst enabling more metrics to be collected from the system.

These metrics provide a comprehensive database of application and resource data, in turn enabling the organisation to gain greater visibility of mainframe performance. By minimising human input, the new approach would reduce the potential for errors whilst manipulating and collating the data and producing appropriate reports. 

Solution in Place
Land Registry decided to build upon the base SAS® system it had been running successfully for many years in the mainframe environment.  It was looking for complementary functionality to port the data into the Windows PC environment, providing quicker access to the database and greater flexibility. Today, the organisation uses SAS® solutions to send and receive data from its mainframe systems, communicate with the Windows environment and to output the manipulated data into Excel.  In addition, it has deployed SAS/AF ® to build object-orientated custom screens for job submission, confirmation, reporting and graphical views.

“Previously, Land Registry had relied almost exclusively on manually producing reports. Using SAS® solutions has given us greater scope to automate the majority of our reports,” says Lee Rymell, Resource Manager and Capacity Planner. “SAS® has enabled us to quickly and easily interrogate the vast amount of historical data, and create new and meaningful reports to assist senior management in decision-making.” 

All of these elements fit within the umbrella of the SAS® IT Resource Management solution, which allows organisations to analyse, monitor and anticipate the utilisation and performance of the IT infrastructure by providing an enterprise-wide view of IT services and resources. The solution ensures that these benefits are delivered in an efficient, cost-effective manner, whilst demonstrating measurable value to the business.

Driving Operational Efficiencies
Today, the organisation reports a broad range of benefits from using SAS® software. The time it spends on producing IT performance reports has been greatly reduced. In fact, it states that the processing time of one report has been effectively reduced from three days to one hour.  By implementing SAS®, Land Registry has also achieved increased visibility of the throughput and resource utilisation of all of its key mainframe applications. While in the past, the extensive amount of time spent by the IT performance team in actually producing reports meant it had little time for in-depth analysis and interpretation, the reverse is now true. Today, it has the resources to quickly develop a detailed understanding of the previous day’s performance. 

 Land Registry believes that implementing SAS® has enabled it to meet the key business challenges that it had prior to the initiative. The IT performance team remains small but Rymell explains, “As the number of services the agency has been offering has grown, so too has the requirement for effective monitoring of the organisation’s computing infrastructure. It would simply not have been possible, using the previous manual methods, for us to have managed all of this additional work. The new automated approach enables us to keep pace with the ever-expanding requirements of the business.”   

At the same time, the accuracy of the data has been improved by reducing the manual element of the process. Equally, the enhancements in data visibility mean that the Land Registry IT performance team is now typically able to diagnose system problems significantly faster than before.

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.

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