Sheep Enhancement Services

Livestock Information Ltd (LI Ltd) provides livestock movement information for industry and government that enables :

Better control of endemic livestock diseases

Terminate exotic disease outbreaks quickly and efficiently.

Drive positive changes in productivity and sustainability.

Develop a competitive trade advantage by building trade partner and consumer confidence in the provenance of British meat and livestock products.

LI Ltd is owned by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and is a Contracting Authority.

The current contract is being delivered by a UK based provider with an offshore capability and is due to expire in April 2025, therefore the Authority is seeking expressions from economic operators who can provide the services.

The sheep application is a component within the LIS multispecies animal movement system.

Sheep movements are recorded though the sheep application customer website and through APIs for third parties such as markets and abattoirs. A back-office administration web interface is provided for customer service support teams.

Data is provided and received from the Livestock Unique Identification Service (LUIS) the ear tag management system and consumed by LI's data and analytics reporting service known as the Data Barn.

LUIS, Data Barn services and customer service support are out of scope for the sheep application support supplier.

The supplier will provide capabilities to deliver application break fix support at Level 3 and Level 4, data fixes, sheep application enhancements or new features, testing, capacity and performance enhancements, Azure cost optimisation, security hardening and end to end testing.

The scope will be expanded to include development, enhancements and support for additional species such as cattle and pigs.

The supplier will follow LI's agile delivery framework and have the opportunity to bring their delivery experience and shape/improve the maturity of agile ways of working.

Azure DevOps is used to maintain the programme and suppliers' backlogs, manage sprint delivery, test cases and pipelines.

The supplier will conduct sprint planning in line with programme iteration planning, business priorities, interproject dependencies, two-week sprint cadence and align to LI's release milestones.

The supplier will build Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery (CICD) pipelines using the LI ADO instance and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) for Infrastructure as Code and for application source code.

The supplier will be responsible for managing pipeline deployments in non-production environments and will be working with the Testing provider and other suppliers.

It is envisaged that the contract will commence onshore and will then be either offshored or nearshored when the services are mature enough to do so.