Athina Douzina, Author at CACI

How Zero Gravity use Acorn to support underrepresented students

Posted on: 11 December 2024

Background

Zero Gravity is a digital platform connecting low-income students in years 12 and 13 with undergraduate mentors for app-based mentoring into highly selective universities. Zero Gravity has previously worked with CACI to enrich their understanding of the backgrounds of thousands of applicants through CACI’s Acorn. This is a geodemographic segmentation of the wider UK population used to assess students’ socio-economic backgrounds based on their postcodes.

Challenge

Matching social and economic needs with educational and career opportunities is one of the major challenges that Zero Gravity has sought to address. Every year, around 50,000 students from socially mobile backgrounds achieve top GCSEs. However, only a third of these students make it to highly selective universities, and even fewer progress into top graduate careers. This discrepancy underscores a prevalent issue: while talent is evenly distributed across socio-economic backgrounds, opportunity is not.

The underrepresentation of socially mobile talent at elite universities and in prestigious careers is not due to a lack of ability. Instead, factors such as the “Network Advantage” (the intangible advantage of having access to a broad professional network identified in Zero Gravity’s Gap Zero report), resource shortages and imposter syndrome often hold these students back. The challenge for Zero Gravity is to bridge this gap, ensuring that talent from low-opportunity backgrounds can access the education and careers they deserve.

Solution

To address this challenge, Zero Gravity developed a sophisticated ‘potential identification system’ to identify and support socially mobile talent. A key component of this algorithm is the integration of contextual student profiling from Acorn. Insights drawn from Acorn provide a granular understanding of the socio-economic environment faced by students at home, enabling Zero Gravity to accurately evaluate their academic potential and their challenges.

By combining this information with Zero Gravity’s own academic performance data, the algorithm indexes top-performing students within the bottom groups of social advantage. This allows Zero Gravity to connect with socially mobile talent at the earliest stages of their educational journey.

By providing rich socio-economic insights, Acorn enhances the precision of Zero Gravity’s talent identification process, ensuring that support is directed towards students who are not only high achieving, but also from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Benefits

In the most recent academic cycle, Zero Gravity has achieved remarkable success by helping over 8,000 students from low-opportunity backgrounds secure places at top-tier universities – all free of charge – due to the social value the organisation drives. Notably, 800 of these students gained admission to Oxford and Cambridge, both of which rank among the top 10 higher education institutions globally. Additionally, Zero Gravity has launched the Zero Gravity Fund, directing nearly £1.5 million towards scholarships for its latest cohort of students.

The success of the current model has enabled Zero Gravity to focus on other opportunities to support disadvantaged students. The university mentoring platform has been such a success that they’ve now developed an innovative new service to help students into the workplace following graduation. Zero Gravity now pairs these young people with industry mentors and provides them with tailored support to access leading universities and, ultimately, successful careers. This enhanced approach not only equips students with the tools and guidance needed to reach their full potential but also contributes to a more diverse and inclusive talent pipeline for employers.

Find out more

Please view the full customer story here. If you want to learn more or have any questions please get in touch with us.

How a digital twin enhances logistics operations

Posted on: 27 June 2024

In our previous blog, we uncovered ways in which logistics operators can introduce customer-centric strategies, including enhancing personalisation within the check-out process. Today, we’ll explore the role of the digital twin in augmenting logistics operations.

What is a digital twin?

A digital twin is a digital model of real-world, physical asset that serves as a counterpart for the simulation, integration, testing, monitoring or maintenance of the physical asset. In the logistics industry, it can model a distribution network to test potential changes and assess the impact on a physical asset or place, ensuring any data-driven changes can be applied to the physical asset or place.

What does a digital twin do?

A digital twin model can help a business assess any changes to their distribution network, run ‘what if?’ scenarios, assess whether a network is fit-for-purpose if product demand or consumer behaviours change, simulate real-world operations to display outcomes depending on where you open distribution centres and much more.

Any changes made to physical assets are reflected in the digital twin model. Despite taking on many forms and possessing various attributes, each model links a physical asset to a digital model to offer a schematic view versus a genuine view of ground assets. This feature can help logistics operators to assess whether they positively supplement the existing distribution network to allow costs and benefits to be analysed digitally before allocating any costs towards bringing them into the physical world.

What difference can a digital twin make on logistics operations?

Digital twins instil logistics operators and retailers with confidence by enabling them to refine supply chain modelling. Through this, they can bolster the visualisation and analysis of their operations, simulate real-world interactions, enhance their decision-making and build a robust and agile distribution network.

Whether it’s monitoring a fleet of vehicles or orchestrating complex supply chain networks, digital twins ensure logistics operators and retailers can test scenarios, mitigate any challenges and hypothesise strategies to drive efficiency and resilience within their organisation. Amazon is typically leading the way and is one example of a company redefining the possibilities of building customer-centric distribution networks, described by SphereWMS as comprising of “…strategically located fulfilment centres, enabling fast and efficient shipping to customers worldwide.”

What makes a good digital twin?

In short, a good digital twin is a tool that is:

Easy to use from setup to navigation, with a user-friendly interface. In the case of a distribution network, a good digital twin includes a map of the whole network
Flexible to be able to model whatever is necessary and underpinned by structures that allow for this (likely to be scripting, not set variables)
Able to produce outputs quickly and easily in the right format for users.

What happens next & how CACI can support

The impact of digital twins can be felt across the entire value chain. Once you’ve built a digital twin, evaluating and optimising from real-world data and feeding it back into the models you’ve got and to determine whether they were a success or not are all aspects of which CACI can support on. We have the data and technology to model that out and de-risks for companies by modelling in a system versus going by gut feelings.

CACI possesses the industry experience and data and consumer insights to help you deliver personalised customer experiences cross-channel at all stages of the customer journey. To find out more about how we can help you reach these goals, contact us today.

Most substantial challenges for healthcare organisations to address in 2024

Posted on: 25 June 2024

Tackling health inequalities is a tremendous challenge. It requires healthcare organisations to understand the demographics, lifestyles, behaviours, needs, and external pressures that individuals across the country face daily with greater accuracy. Access to accurate and detailed data significantly impacts an organisation’s ability to develop a robust response to inequalities and determine which services will meet local needs.

In our recent webinar for NHS England on “Tackling Health Inequalities with Effective Data & Insight”, we explored the impact of our datasets and insights on NHS England’s ability to tackle current health inequalities and devise strategies to improve future outcomes.

So, what have the findings from our various datasets and our Voice of the Nation (VOTN) Q1 2024 survey shown regarding the behaviours and health concerns of different demographic and affluence groups across the UK? How can healthcare organisations apply these findings to improve outcomes for their local communities?

Half of the survey respondents are concerned about their personal wellbeing and mental health

Personal wellbeing and mental health are incredibly important considerations for the NHS. According to our survey results, these have been hugely concerning for people of various ages across the UK, with 50% of our VOTN Q1 2024 survey respondents claiming to be concerned about both. This is the highest number of respondents for these sentiments that CACI has ever seen in the four years of this survey being conducted, demonstrating the need for healthcare organisations to review their current offering of personal wellbeing and mental health services avoiding a ‘one size fits all’ approach that targets all ages.

Millennials are the most concerned of all age groups about their health

While the traditional assumption may be that younger generations are more carefree and less preoccupied with the concerns of the world, our survey results have shown the opposite. Millennials were the most concerned of all age groups (from Boomers to Gen Z) for their personal wellbeing and mental health, with more than two-thirds feeling this way. This further reiterates the necessity of ensuring that all age groups—particularly Millennials—are offered relevant personal wellbeing and mental health services.

Affluence does not shield from health concerns

Our survey results indicated that personal wellbeing and mental health concerns have been affecting individuals across all affluence levels. While one might assume that higher-affluence individuals experience fewer wellbeing and mental health concerns, our findings revealed that as many as half of the respondents from the higher-affluence Acorn categories of Luxury Lifestyles and Established Affluence expressed concern about these aspects of their lives. Respondents from the Low Income Living Acorn category expressed the highest level of concern for both areas.

These insights provide concrete evidence for healthcare organisations to tailor their services based on the specific needs of different affluence groups, rather than relying on open data or assumptions. These results demonstrate the right healthcare services must be accessible across all affluence levels.

How can CACI help?

CACI can help healthcare organisations tackle health inequalities, supporting a range of clinical areas of health inequalities from severe mental illness (SMI) to maternity and chronic respiratory disease (CPD) to early cancer diagnosis, hypertension case-finding and more. Our partnership with NHS England provides all 42 integrated care boards (ICBs) with free access to a variety of datasets that are being used to tackle health inequalities.

Contact us today to learn more about our partnership with NHS England or to find out how our datasets can improve outcomes for your healthcare organisation.

Harnessing the power of personalisation to bolster customer-centric fulfilment

Posted on: 20 June 2024

At this year’s Leaders in Logistics Summit, we explored the growing impacts of personalisation and digital twins to help logistics operators understand how they can make foundational, operational improvements to deliver fulfilling customer experiences. What we found was that ultimately, to create highly targeted and effective customer-centric fulfilment strategies, logistics operators and retailers may want to consider the following to achieve customer-centric fulfilment:

Personalisation: Understand your customers to build a personalised post-purchase fulfilment process
Network: Build a customer-centric distribution network.

Nowadays, long-term customer retention and satisfaction requires much more than simply successfully delivering products or services to their doorstep. Customer-centric fulfilment now requires logistics operators and retailers to carefully consider the role of personalisation and fuse their understanding of logistics and customers to meet the unique needs of each customer, turning fulfilment into a function that will benefit the organisation. Customer-centric fulfilment is therefore no longer regarded as a background aspect, it is now of prominent importance due to the tremendous difference it can bring to an organisation.

So, how exactly can personalisation enhance customer-centric fulfilment? Why should logistics operators and retailers consider the impact of personalisation on their long-term performance and outcomes? What data and technology should logistics operators consider to achieve this?

Investing in personalisation to improve customer fulfilment

Acquiring new customers requires a substantially higher investment than retaining customers. Building customer loyalty and retaining customers through personalised, customer-centric fulfilment is ultimately easier and more beneficial for a business’ long-term growth and profitability than purely investing in trying to get new audiences. In fact, research shows that:

Harnessing data & technology to enhance customer fulfilment in delivery

Data and technology enable customer-centric fulfilment by equipping logistics operators and retailers with an integral competitive advantage. In the customer journey, a well-executed fulfilment experience after their purchase, will result in them being more receptive to re-marketing, repeat sales, becoming an advocate and ultimately becoming highly profitable. Otherwise, if the fulfilment is poorly executed, customers will have a negative experience that then gets in the way of re-engagement in the future.

Customer-centric fulfilment creates an opportunity for the logistics function to positively impact the business’ performance beyond keeping costs down – by enabling better profitability. This can be pivotal for both merchants and carriers. Merchants will find that this presents a direct opportunity to improve customer retention. For carriers, it’s an opportunity to differentiate services, retaining and winning more contracts.

How can CACI help?

CACI can support you with the personalisation necessary to achieve customer-centric fulfilment. This begins with using the right data, AI and machine learning to understand each customer, predicting their preferences to ensure the right fulfilment journey can be put in place for them to achieve a positive experience.

This can start in the basket, when delivery options are first displayed to the customer. Personalised delivery options can be offered to fit the nuances of the customer, which may include understanding how tech-savvy the customer is to subtly change the language that is used, offering assistance to elderly customers, anticipating that young adult customers may be less likely to be at home during the day, suggesting other options (evening delivery or PUDO collection) and so on. This can be followed through all customer communications up to and including post-delivery. If a customer has this positive experience (and costs are kept down), the logistics function has fulfilled its role.

CACI possesses the industry experience and data and consumer insights to help you deliver personalised customer-centric fulfilment and experiences cross-channel at all stages of the customer journey. To find out more about how we can help you reach these goals, contact us today.

Stay tuned for the upcoming and final blog of this two-part series, where we’ll explore the role of the digital twin in augmenting logistics operations.

How Roche diversified international clinical trials through demographic & health variable data

Posted on: 26 April 2024

Background

For international pharmaceutical and diagnostics company, Roche, a core function of the organisation is the running of clinical trials for regulatory approval of new medications. In particular, the Insights and Analytics team is involved in supporting late-stage trials by identifying the most appropriate hospital locations and clinical trial patients for these trials across countries to enable the most effective recruitment process.

The Challenge:

Historically, clinical trial populations have often differed from the populations that use the medications, resulting in clinical trial patients being predominantly Caucasian and coming from more affluent socioeconomic backgrounds.
Regulations are evolving and regulatory agencies are driving a new view on diversity and inclusion in clinical trials.
Lack of data availability, legal barriers, data collection and protection and privacy issues are all common hurdles in clinical trials, especially in Europe.

The Solution:

By working with CACI, Roche’s Insights and Analytics team has used a combination of demographic and health variable data within CACI’s analytical and mapping tool, InSite, to determine locations that would best suit the recruitment of more diverse populations for clinical trials in five European markets.

With diversifying clinical trials being the team’s goal, the key variables they needed to understand included ethnicity, deprivation, education attainment, economic status, rural versus urban, smoking, pollution and other disease risk factors. CACI developed bespoke models for these variables by combining key demographics such as age, income and gender with survey data on a country-by-country basis to generate models at a postcode level for each of the required countries.

The Results:

While still in its early days, Roche’s Insights and Analytics team has already tremendously benefitted from CACI’s bespoke model and expertise, delivering the model to the team and providing training on how to use it. The
team has since been able to use data-driven decision-making to tackle any clinical trial strategisation obstacles versus relying on assumption.

Having previously worked with CACI on smaller, UK focused projects, the ability to now take this bespoke model to scale so that it can be accessed across other countries has augmented Roche’s diversity strategy, with the team particularly pleased by CACI’s quick data generation and innovation in terms of modelled data from survey data sources.

The innovative approach with CACI was taking all that demographic data collected across Europe, tagging it with running surveys, and modelling it based on… geographic locations of different populations. That allowed us to come up with some numbers in those various locations, which was something we couldn’t find anywhere else.

Jonathan Wharton, Portfolio Analytics Manager at Roche

Read the case study:

You can access and download the full case study here. If you have any questions or want to learn more about CACI’s solutions, please get in touch with us.

How local authorities can use route optimisation for Home to School Transport (HTST)

Posted on: 18 April 2024

At a time when budgets are under so much pressure, facilitating Home to School Transport (HTST) efficiently has never been more important. Millions of pounds are being unnecessarily spent on passenger transportation, with limited efficiencies or cost-cutting initiatives in place through a lack of supporting technology or tools.

With spiralling costs, tightened budgets and limited capacity, local authorities are struggling to delivery their statutory obligations. So, what can be done to save costs while optimising HTST capabilities?

Most substantial challenges local authorities face with Home to School Transport (HTST)

SEND costs are set to triple to £1.125 billion over the course of a decade, according to the Isos Partnership for the County Council’s Network
Havering Council is spending £6.5m per annum on transporting 420 pupils, resulting in £2,500 per pupil
Birmingham City Council is currently spending £19.4 million on transporting vulnerable children to school
Norfolk County Council is spending £40m to arrange buses/taxis for 4,100 children with extra requirements, or more than £9,700 per child.

Local governments must find ways to:

Efficiently plan routes buses to minimise contracts and private taxis
Deliver safe and reliable service to pupils
Ensure safeguards are in place to protect vulnerable pupils
Establish communication with parents, schools and councils
Offset increasing council deficits through efficiency savings.

What CACI technology solutions can help local authorities overcome these challenges?

Pin Routes: Route planning & optimisation

As a next-generation route planning and optimisation software, Pin Routes helps local authorities plan and optimise routes for school transport. It is cloud-based, scalable software that features advanced algorithms and a state-of-the-art user interface, with functions including strategic analysis and static (periodic) and dynamic (daily) planning.

Pin Routes considers the individual needs of each child, special school requirements, vehicle capabilities, provider capacities and driver skillsets to help achieve lower costs and carbon emissions.

Pin Live: Live route management

This live route management software ensures all parties stay informed in real-time, giving parents and schools peace of mind with up-to-date information, keeping local authorities in control and simplifying the process for drivers and service providers.

Acorn: Consumer segmentation

CACI’s consumer segmentation tool, Acorn provides demographic, lifestyle and behavioural insights of pupils. Acorn unlocks detailed insights about families’ financial backgrounds which can be used to determine those pupil households who could contribute towards transportation costs. Access to this data equips local authorities with additional capabilities to better assess pupils’ eligibility for school transport while at the same helping the Council to meet with its statutory obligations.

Longer-term benefits local authorities will enjoy with CACI’s data and technology solutions

Saving operational costs:

Councils will have more time to effectively plan at a strategic level
Vehicles can complete more tasks
Pin Routes will ensure councils can undertake ‘what if’ analyses for future scenarios to uncover and implement strategic efficiencies
Inputs can be scaled up and higher volumes of transport can be supported each year.

Improve efficiencies:

Planners and schedulers can prioritise journeys quickly, effectively and on a regular basis
Transport providers can take the most effective routes between homes and schools to save on fuel, mileage and drivers’ hours
New tasks can be imported as they are booked and teams can pick these up as part of their existing plans, ensuring the right tasks will be prioritised.

Improve ESG and resident-centric operations:

Councils can be confident in delivering a consistent service to residents
Journeys will be made efficiently, reducing the spend on fuel and vehicle maintenance. Monthly cuts in CO2 emissions will also be recognised.
Enhanced scheduling and routing will increase driver and resident satisfaction as journeys are prioritised and optimised.

CACI is already a trusted data partner to the public sector and has a proven track record of delivering cost-effective, sustainable logistics solutions to organisations within the private sector. Whether through our innovative software and communication technology like Pin Routes, Pin Live and Acorn, our expert consulting services or our innate public sector knowledge and experience, we are committed to supporting your organisation in achieving its goals.

For further information on how CACI can help transform your route optimisation operations, please register here.

Impact of consumers’ changing Christmas spending on Grocery retailers

Posted on: 12 December 2023

Findings from our latest Cost of Living survey show that while this may be the most wonderful time of the year for some, this sentiment remains aspirational for others in the current climate.

With Christmas spending behaviours changing across all demographic groups, where are consumers opting to shop during this festive period? Which retailers are appealing to which age ranges, and which are benefitting the most from the resurgence of consuming food and drinks at home during the festive period?

Christmas grocery shopping behaviours breakdown

Despite a gradual decline in the perceived impact of the cost of living on households over the last 18 months, 63% of all respondents surveyed remain “somewhat concerned” or “very concerned” about the increased cost of food and drink this Christmas. The most concerned groups are those in the lower affluence Acorn categories, comprising 66-68% of respondents. On the other hand, the higher affluence Acorn categories of Established Affluence and Luxury Lifestyles are among those marginally less concerned about these increased costs, at 52% and 63% respectively.

So, where are these shoppers turning to for their groceries? How much of an impact does ‘value for money’ messaging and promotional activity have on consumers’ purchasing decisions ahead of the festive season?

Where are consumers shopping this holiday season?

When asked about their preferred Grocery retailer for their main Christmas shop this year, there was an uptick in consumers’ preference for Sainsbury’s (16% in 2023 versus 11% in 2022), and a pronounced drop in consumers’ interest in shopping at Aldi from 19% in 2022 to 13% in 2023.

Sainsbury’s was the favourable choice for 20% of Boomers and older generations, while only 7% of Gen Z respondents said that their Christmas grocery shop takes place here, turning to Grocery retailers like Asda (19%) and Aldi (17%) instead. Tesco came out on top at 25% and was the most popular choice across all generations and Acorn categories.

Differences between where those who are/aren’t concerned will shop

Among those concerned about the cost of F&B, there’s a nearly three-way tie for the second most popular retailer between Sainsbury’s, Asda and Aldi for main grocery shop at 16% for Asda, 15% for Sainsbury’s and 14% for Aldi. For those who are reportedly unconcerned, however, the split shifts to 17% for Sainsbury’s, 13% for Asda and just 9% for Aldi.

With heightening concerns around the cost of food and drink, Grocery retailers looking to attract price-conscious customers in the run up to Christmas should focus on creating effective ‘value for money’ messaging and promotional offers. The fight to retain customer loyalty is in full swing, with the holiday season being a key period for major Grocery retailers to retain and gain customers.

Therefore, retailers that promote competitive pricing and supply exclusive Christmas deals and limited time offers will attract consumers who are on the hunt for the best deals during the holiday season and retain their loyalty.

Resurgence of socialising and consuming food & drinks at home

When asked how important various social activities this Christmas were, 79% of respondents surveyed considered the most important to be ‘food and drink at home’. Gen Z and millennial respondents placed the most importance on this festive social activity at 84%, along with families with children at home at 87%. On the other hand, only 75% of baby boomers and older generations felt this way.

In terms of Acorn categories, each category ranked this social activity as ‘most important’, with ‘gifting’ coming in second place.

As the younger generations and families with children are often the demographics attending or hosting holiday festivities in their homes during this time of year, there is an evident increase in the purchasing of food and drinks to cater to the increase in home visitors. Hosts are likelier to opt into buying higher-quality foods and alcoholic beverages to ensure their guests have a memorable dining experience, which further contributes to the uptick in spending at various Grocery retailers during this time of year.

How can CACI help?

As the cost of living continues to impact consumers and contribute to changes in spending behaviours ahead of the holidays, CACI can help you determine the impact that these changes may have on your business’ performance both in terms of its online halo and physical store network, how to navigate the changing behaviours of various Acorn groups and devise strategies for success at each of your store locations.

To learn more about how you can futureproof your business through data-backed insights, please contact Valentins Kirillovs.

How CACI’s GIS software accelerates business growth for Müller Milk & Ingredients

Posted on: 6 December 2023

Background

Müller Milk and Ingredients Distribution (MMID) is a milk business collecting over a billion litres of raw milk annually, distributing it to supermarkets, convenience stores and wholesaler customers across the UK. MMID has approximately 6,000 delivery points throughout the country and runs a mixed fleet of heavy goods vehicles, ranging from 26-tonne rigid lorries to 44-tonne artics. MMID also owns six dairies and 10 distribution depots along the west side of the country.

The Challenge

MMID is a large and complex business forming several types of delivery points of varying volumes. Due to the thousands of delivery points and farms that the business collects raw milk from, gaining a comprehensive and translatable view of customers has been a complicated task. A lack of granularity into the visualisation of farms and depots had prevented MMID from innately analysing customer trends and ultimately supplying senior management with a digestible lay of the land that could enhance their decision- making and strategies.

The Solution

MMID uses CACI’s market leading GIS platform and unique data solutions to create a map of the UK that highlights where depots, shops and supplies are located. The tool equips MMID with valuable visual insight that far exceeds the capabilities of a data spreadsheet in terms of highlighting customer patterns and trends that can be presented to senior stakeholders concisely. Key findings can be translated via a map when meeting with senior stakeholders and the map can be drawn on directly to illustrate any areas or circumstances that need to be addressed.

Anthony Helm, Central Transport Planner at MMID, explained the impact that having this detailed visual representation of these countrywide locations has had on their business operations.

We recognise CACI as one of the major players in this sector and the tool as a leading solution. Our work with CACI has spanned over a decade and their ongoing support and consultancy along with the tool itself have made tremendous differences to our location planning processes and outcomes.

The Benefits

In terms of farm collection, CACI’s GIS tool has supported MMID by effectively refreshing and reviewing the boundaries between various operations. This insight enhances their planning for reducing overall costs and fuel consumption of their fleet, both of which are critical agenda points for the business to tackle when considering their carbon capture. On the delivery side, CACI’s GIS tool has aided MMID in strategically moving their customers to the appropriate delivery profile based on their geographic locations. This has bolstered the entire process of onboarding new customers.

Read the case study

You can access and download the full case study here. If you have any questions or want to learn more about CACI’s solutions, please get in touch with us.

How Orkney Islands Council is tackling housing affordability, education accessibility and fuel poverty

Posted on: 5 December 2023

Background

Orkney Islands Council is the smallest council in the United Kingdom, situated on Scotland’s north-east coast. With a population of approximately 22,000 people, it spans 70 square miles and encompasses 22 inhabited islands. Orkney Islands Council supplies all local authority services for the archipelago, including education, roads, housing, waste collection and more.

Of the many areas of support that the Council provides, three of the focus areas have been to update the Housing Need and Demand Assessment (HNDA), to receive approval to support families and children in need through education and tackling fuel poverty. To address these priorities, the Council needed accurate, up-to-date, and consistent information that would help benchmark Orkney against other parts of the country.

The Challenge: Lack of robust, credible information due to small yet widespread population

One of the greatest challenges for the Council has been Orkney’s small yet widespread population. This has complicated the acquisition of statistical information – particularly information that is robust and credible. Slight changes in population size can considerably sway numeric results, which has hindered the Council’s benchmarking capability and innate understanding of the financial realities of Orkney’s inhabitants.

David Brown, Service Manager (Resources) within Education, Leisure and Housing at Orkney Islands Council, elaborated on the impact this lack of decipherable data has had on the Council and the population financially.

“One of the difficulties within Orkney is that we are very spread out. We have deprivation, but there’s nothing indicating that we have a particular housing estate or area where we need to put resources,” he explained.

The Solution: Paycheck enables updates to the Housing Need and Demand Assessment (HNDA) and supplies granular insight on housing affordability

Paycheck gives the Council a unique, granular point of view and information that has enabled their benchmarking against other local authorities and how Orkney compares to other parts of the country. Through Paycheck data, the Council has also been able to update their HNDA, a document that analyses the projection of Orkney’s population over the next five to twenty years which helps the Council establish the necessary housing and school programmes. The information within this document looks at the affordability of housing, which correlates with residents’ income, coupled with demand.

The Council assesses residents’ incomes against the likelihood of owner occupiers and current housing availability for those seeking private rentals, mid-market rentals and social rentals. This supplies insights that evidence decision-making linked to residential building programmes and determine how fast growth can be delivered.

This has been complicated by the fact that the population across the group of islands is increasing at the same rate as the whole of Scotland at 6%, with vast differences between life on the islands and on mainland Scotland. Orkney residents must adapt to much greater extenuating circumstances that come with higher costs, and the Council has had to find a way to prove these differences through data to the Scottish government. Paycheck has bridged this gap by providing an accurate representation of the current circumstances in Orkney, enabling the Council to strategise and plan for the most suitable house build programmes that have been acknowledged and approved by the government.

The Benefits

The integration of CACI’s Paycheck into Orkney Islands Council’s operations has yielded transformative outcomes, with its robust and credible data supplied proving to be key in decision-making processes. Notably, Paycheck has streamlined the approval of the HNDA, securing the necessary signoff from the Scottish government. Without this approval, the Council would have had to revisit and overhaul the entire HNDA, which would have resulted in a substantial loss of time and resources. Paycheck’s precise income
models and predictive capabilities have played a crucial role in ensuring that the HNDA remains accurate and credible.

Paycheck has also been instrumental in redefining residents’ financial realities in light of fuel poverty. It equips the Council with accurate data on residents’ earnings, enabling a greater understanding of communities that are at the most risk with rising fuel costs and may need Council support. The reallocation of resources in education has also been supported by Paycheck. By analysing school catchment areas and identifying pockets of deprivation, the Council can allocate resources to ensure access to education, fostering a more inclusive and supportive learning environment.

Ultimately, Paycheck has become an indispensable tool for the Council to address the triad of housing affordability, fuel poverty and education accessibility in a comprehensive, data-driven capacity.

Read the case study

You can access and download the full case study here. If you have any questions or want to learn more about CACI’s solutions, please get in touch with us.

How CACI helped DX to grow business and drive efficiencies

Posted on: 15 August 2023

About DX

DX is a well-established provider of a wide range of delivery services to both business and residential addresses across the UK and Ireland. First established in 1975, DX now provides one of the widest ranges of overnight delivery services in the region, as well as logistics services.

The Challenge

DX instigated a tender with both business development and operational objectives:

Business Development

To introduce a tool to improve the contract bidding process. The solution needed to provide:

Flexibility to model different datasets from a diverse range of existing and potential clients
Data-driven information to determine the most appropriate solution
Reliability to provide accurate overheads and costings for the business to plan
Speed to produce quality results within short timeframes to aid winning more business

Operational Use

To implement the most appropriate route planning and optimisation software to bring daily efficiencies and cost savings across multiple contracts. The operational requirements were:

Significant cost savings
Accurate ETAs
Flexibility to use on many different types of contract
Usability for numerous teams of planners

The Solution

CACI won the tender and implemented its market leading route optimisation solution. Initially it was rolled out across multiple contracts, being used by different teams of planners, as well as in solution design to support and improve the business development and pricing function. DX have now been relying on CACI for over 10 years to grow their business and keep their staff and customers happy.

The Benefits

DX use CACI’s solution in business development to model client data for each tender, improving the process and increasing the company’s win rate. James Wood, Head of Solutions says:

On a daily basis it is absolutely key to us. This is about providing efficient data-driven solutions. Gut feel backed by data becomes irrefutable.

The route optimisation solution has introduced efficiency to operations through process improvement, as well as bringing huge savings by reducing costs.

Read the full case study here. For more information on how CACI can help you optimise your operation, get in touch and one of our data experts will happily arrange a time to talk.