Interfront Annual Report 2022

28 PART B: PERFORMANCE REPORT 4. OPERATIONAL HIGHLIGHTS • SARS’ operational support functioned effectively in the period under review and consistently met the SLA targets for each month of the reporting period. Over this period, Interfront provided 80 releases to SARS, of which 28 were deployed to production. • Production Support Services to SARS increased by 24%, handling a total of 1 438 incidents, and 21 production changes (Engineering Change Proposals (ECPs)). • The Registration, Licensing and Accreditation (RLA) project received special recognition at the SARS internal awards by lifting the ‘superstar’ award. • RLA packaged releases were delivered to SARS. These included functionality for renewals, additional and modified client types, as well as updates for the Workflow engine and User Interface improvements. • The successful use of the automated deployment tool (XebiaLabs Deploy (XLD)) was achieved to simplify software deployments in the SARS environments. • Cargo Processing updates for the part clearance of declarations and Advanced Payment Notification (APN) were successfully deployed into production in May 2021 and December 2021, respectively. • All three of the RLA packaged releases delivered to SARS during the year were successfully deployed into production. • Ten system releases to ADA were made, of which eight were deployed into production, including various enhancements, scripts and ‘bug fixes’ to the current import/export and cargo systems. • Function Point Measurement (FPM) capability established. • During the last quarter of the 2021/2022 financial year, Interfront started the on-boarding of the Tax team. 5. OPERATIONAL CHALLENGES • A continued increase in production operational support has been provided to SARS in the past financial year. This is most likely attributable to the RLA module going into production, together with a simultaneous loss of technical skills at SARS. Consequently, Interfront is managing its resources across production support and multiple development and delivery streams. • The additional technical support required for the various SARS environments, the overlapping of different application versions and systems in these environments, as well as the dependency and complexity of these systems, continue to place additional pressure on operational deliverables. • Budget limitations continue to pose challenges as resources compete for funds.