Case Study: HM Revenue & Customs achieves real-time insights for mobile inspectors with Microsoft Power BI

UK tax authority underpins organizational transformation with modern, mobile technologies

HM Revenue & Customs (HM Revenue & Customs), the UK’s tax, payments, and customs authority with 56,000 employees, needed to transform into a digital-first organization to boost collaboration, support mobile field staff, increase productivity, and protect large volumes of confidential taxpayer data. To meet these challenges it adopted a Microsoft-based technology stack — Surface Pro devices, Windows 10 Enterprise, Office 365 and Azure — and incorporated Microsoft Power BI for reporting and analytics.

The vendor solution included a custom ORCA mobile app (developed with Capgemini and Microsoft Consulting Services) running on Surface Pro devices, with data secured by TPM, BitLocker and stored in the UK Azure datacenter; Microsoft Power BI provided reporting and analysis. The program rolled out 25,000 Surface Pros (97% on Windows 10) and, after a six-month development and pilot, put the ORCA app into use by all 300 Road Fuel Testing Unit inspectors by May 2017, eliminating paper forms, delivering time savings, enabling offline capture and e-signatures, improving real-time intelligence and deployment, and driving measurable gains in inspector productivity and operational efficiency.

HM Revenue & Customs

Steven Walters

Chief Technology Officer