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Chairman Update 17th February 2021

This update is part information and part plea to Members regarding the office administration processes.

I have recently received queries from Members regarding the turnaround time for registration related work such as dog registrations, transfer of ownership and mating cards, of which currently the Society has a backlog of approximately four weeks work.

During January alone the office received approximately 1500 pieces of registration related work for processing. At present the Society has the FTE of 3.5 registration officers dealing with registration related work. Further analysis shows that during January 80% of the registration related work submitted from Members was submitted containing errors. This has an enormous effect on the turnaround time of completing work and has a knock-on effect to the productivity of our staff. Many hours and days are wasted chasing Members for signatures and missing information. The percentage in errors occurring during January is not a one-off, this is a consistent error rate experienced monthly.

Issues our staff are faced with daily include:

  • Transfer of Ownership where a previous owner has not been recorded with the Society, and on many occasions two to three transfers of ownerships have not taken place. This turns a 5-minute job in to one that could take several weeks to resolve due to obtaining the signature of a past owner, which could have been from several years in the past.
  • Mating cards in the wrong owner’s name due to a transfer of ownership not taking place, again another 5-minute job that can take several weeks to resolve. In these circumstances the recording of the mating is delayed until the relevant transfer of ownership is completed.
  • Missing information from puppy registration forms e.g. coat type, microchip number, drawings not completed, DNA results not received, vet sample forms not received.

All these issues result in time consuming and unnecessary telephone calls and emails to Members until the error has been resolved. Our staff do their best to assist, however their time should not be used in this way.

I am therefore asking our Members to take great care when filling in any forms, and to double-check that all the required sections of the forms are completed. Even simple errors such as forms not signed result in unnecessary delays in processing the item. This is the single most helpful way Members can support our hard-working Office staff.

I also report that during January we had one of our staff members affected by COVID-19, she was extremely unwell for three weeks, but thankfully she is now recovering well.

As previously reported, Council have commissioned an IT audit as it is evident that the Society processing procedures are very lengthy, disjointed and time consuming. The majority of our current, dated IT infrastructure does not communicate between applications used within the Society, resulting in extremely time-consuming manual data inputting, and crosschecking to complete even the most basic of tasks. Significant savings are available to the Society in both time and money, resulting from overdue system and procedure development.

I would like to take this opportunity to say a huge thank you to our office team for all they have done for the Society over the past year. They have been working remotely from their homes for almost a year now.

Kind Regards

Ian Fleming

SagePay