Case Study: Pesticides Safety Directorate achieves paperless, efficient pesticide approvals and £100K savings with Actian Ingres Database

The Pesticides Safety Directorate Eradicates Inefficiency with Actian Ingres Database

The Pesticides Safety Directorate (PSD), a 200‑person UK government agency responsible for ensuring the safety and regulatory compliance of plant protection products, needed to improve efficiency and handle rising regulatory demands without increasing costs. PSD’s IT team was tasked with delivering fully electronic services and an end‑to‑end workflow for new product applications while staying within a tight budget.

PSD implemented the Actian Ingres Database with OpenROAD to build a secure web front end and electronic signing workflow. The solution proved reliable and cost‑effective, cutting paperwork and processing time, serving hundreds of thousands of web pages monthly, delivering immediate savings of £100,000 in the first two years, launching on time and under budget, and positioning PSD to expand digitization with XML/XForms and open‑source platforms.

Pesticides Safety Directorate

Andrew Park

IS Project Manager