THE CHALLENGE

• The Danish EPA needed to define a method to review and inspect Danish companies and universities dealing with genetic resources to facilitate compliance with the Nagoya Protocol on ABS. Based on the Nagoya Protocol, the EU regulation regarding Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) was created.

• ABS focus on bio-diversity and fair and equal distribution of profits from the use of genetic resources, to ensure that there are agreements and given consent between users of genetic resources and their countries of origins - across country’s borders.

• The EPA was looking to get an overview of all actual users with access to the genetic resources in line with the ABS regulation, via a designed survey. It was also important to raise awareness with users regarding the regulations.

• The EPA wanted to monitor user compliance and perform digital and physical inspections in a precise, streamlined way and focusing only on actual ABS users.

• The main challenge was to define the actual processes to ensure compliance with the regulations.

THE Solution

cBrain's solution, F2, with case guides in combination with online self-services, has been designed to allow for:

• Automatic creation of cases from an Excel list of ‘potential users’, adding a case guide to manage the workflow of assessing the users’ work around genetic resources (companies and universities).

• Self-service forms sent to the users via hearing links, in order to perform a survey and gather information of their utilization of genetic resources.

• Users to submit information around their usage of genetic resources.

• The EPA to request further information/documentation from the users of genetic resources via hearing links.

• The EPA to review the information submitted and to send out automatic reminders or begin inspection of non-compliant users.

• Upon finalizing the digital inspection case, the EPA can choose to add a physical inspection case if needed.

THE BENEFITS

• The solution allows caseworkers to handle many processes in a more efficient way and from a single platform.

• The department can create multiple cases and send out e-mail surveys in bulk.

• The department has a better overview over who has answered the questionnaire and about any possible further inspections or request of information needed in addition.

• Possibility to extract ad-hoc reports via search templates.

• Case guides clearly define the workflow for case handling to assess if users are complying with the Nagoya Protocol / ABS regulation.

• Replacing multiple systems with one digital platform, which allows for a clear overview of case progress and workload, more transparency and knowledge sharing. Avoidance of duplicate information, cases and documents.

• Automated standardized document production based on F2 templates.

• Correspondence and documents are automatically added to each case, and data is available for reporting and progress tracking.

• E-mails, cases and records are indexed and fully searchable.