In this section we will look at some of the recent assignments undertaken by stpsolutions  and explain how such diverse assignments all have a common thread. Residential Conveyancing or Lenders Conveyancing do not appear to have much in common with designing a Service Catalogue or implementing Enterprise Project Management systems or building a Business Reporting Service - but they do.

In each of these assignments stpsolutions'  expertise in understanding the end-to-end business processes, the business rules that have to be applied at every step and the design of a workflow of electronic messages between disparate systems, has proved to be invaluable to the clients. Although no physical goods are delivered (apart from documents), this set of processes both internal and external to an organization, is as much of a supply chain as any manufacturing or retailing process - it's an Information Supply Chain.

Indeed, one early experience of stpsolutions' managing director, Andrew Chilcott, with manufacturing process engineering had a great bearing on his subsequent thinking. As System Director of a firm of stockbrokers he was invited to a factory in Scotland where the Japanese computer suppliers had recently installed a new production line. Parts were ordered and delivered to a pre-planned schedule to reduce stock-holding and had a barcoded label attached to them as soon as they entered the assembly plant. Once they had been selected using robotics, they entered the assembly line. Here was the key, after every process, there was a subsequent automated process to check whether the previous one had been successful. If a fault was discovered, the part was diverted away from the main assembly line into a siding where a specialist could repair or discard. Using this methodology, no process was ever wasted on a product that would ultimately fail. By the time it was placed in a box at the end of the assembly line the product had been throughly tested at every stage of its assembly.

Armed with this, he looked at a major problem in his stockbroking office where faulty booking of manually written deal slips was causing 14% of all transactions to be re-booked the following day. By introducing a series of double checks prior to the initial input of the deal, the re-booking was cut to 2% within three months. The securities industry was one of the early adopters of electronic transactions and settlement, and the phrase Straight Through Processing came into common usage - hence stpsolutions.

Now some fifteen years later, the software industry is only just beginning to adopt the same methodology when building IT applications - model based development where all the test cases are built prior to a single line of code being written.