Computing Awards - Projects of the Year (1)

Private Sector Projects of the Year

Argos

A fraud management system that Argos has introduced across its 604 stores has saved more than £700,000 since going live in April this year.

Profit protection managers at the retailer used to be reactive and their work labour-intensive. The company piloted a new process, based on software from supplier IntelliQ, in November 2004, and achieved a return on investment in just three months thanks to a more proactive targeting of fraudsters.

The system analyses sales information, helping to identify unusual behaviour and providing facts to back up any anomalies that it finds.

Argos is now working with sister company Homebase on a centre of excellence for fraud across the group.

‘We needed something that freed up store management time, but, equally importantly, increased the business benefits returned by our investigators,’ says Adrian Sherry, protection solutions manager at Argos.

‘We are now able to identify even quite sophisticated crimes, such as multi-store or multi-credit card offences.’

Transys

The Transys consortium, led by EDS and Cubic, designed, implemented and now manages Prestige, the integrated smartcard ticketing system branded Oyster, which is used across London Underground and the capital’s bus network.

Working in partnership with Transport for London, Transys has achieved a number of notable successes.

Tube station congestion has eased, with 40 people per minute able to pass through ticket gates using the smartcard readers, rather than 25 using paper tickets. Bus boarding is three times faster. And more than £100m in savings is expected in the next five years from making buses cashless.

The system also gathers extensive information on sales and travel trends, and helps to beat fraud by automatically disabling cards that are used illegally. Transport for London is also in talks to allow Oyster to be used for other services across the capital, as well as offering an e-money facility to pay for goods in local retail outlets.

Nearly three million journeys are now made in London every day using Oyster.

Premier Travel Inn

In July 2004, Whitbread acquired the Premier Lodge hotel chain for £505m, with the aim of combining the business with its Travel Inn operation.

The merger required a major IT integration and deployment project. Premier Lodge had to be separated from former parent company Spirit’s IT systems, and brought onto the Travel Inn reservations system. The company decided that a complete overhaul of back-office systems was also needed, covering finance, human resources and supply chain, as well as replacing the entire Premier Lodge ‘front of house’ infrastructure.

Detailed planning was carried out in advance, led by IT director Susan Thomas. The day after the acquisition was completed, the team was ready to start work, and the first hotels were rebranded as Premier Travel Inn just five weeks later. At its peak, the project was converting 50 hotels per week to the new brand.

The team took just 32 weeks to replace front- and back-office systems in all of the chain’s hotels, implement a new network, deliver more than 3,000 hours of training to 1,000 people, and transfer 100,000 bookings onto the central reservations system.

British Airways

British Airways’ ‘Customer Enabled BA’ project was the airline’s response to 9/11 and the downturn in the travel sector.

The plan involved web-enabling the company’s booking, loyalty, checking-in and other customer services on a single ecommerce platform available through www.ba.com.

But this meant much more than simply a new web site. For BA to achieve its aim in only two years required new IT governance, integration and design processes across the organisation.

At the heart of the project was a new Integrated Applications Infrastructure. A combined IT and business team introduced new componentised software development techniques based on a service-oriented architecture, as well as introducing open, standardised technologies such as Linux on Intel-based servers.

This approach offers central control over multiple teams in several locations. Business processes are simplified, and rapid application development has speeded up the release of new software.

The flexible, component-based environment has already saved nearly £100m, says BA. One new function – allowing customers to upgrade easily when booking online – returned the £1m invested in the programme within just three months. Nearly one-third of BA’s 36 million customers now use the BA site to book flights or manage their booking.

Tube Lines

Tube Lines is responsible for maintaining the capital’s underground network across 100 stations on the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines, which can carry 1.4 million passengers every day.

The company invested £30m in new integrated applications to replace 500 legacy IT systems inherited from London Underground, to drive a major change in the way assets are managed across its network.

The aim is to introduce a ‘whole-life’ asset management strategy rather than traditional planned maintenance work, to monitor and maintain items such as tracks, trains, signals and station equipment more effectively.

The plan covered implementation and integration of eight core systems, including project, asset, contract and document management, fault reporting, planning and financials.

A geographical information system gives tube managers a clear picture of asset

conditions and maintenance activity. The company also introduced the first use of wireless-enabled handheld devices on the Underground.

The four-stage project involved more than 150 staff, with 11 different suppliers, while ensuring the tube lines kept running as normal throughout the change.

Public Sector Projects of the Year

The British Army

Armynet is the first Ministry of Defence (MoD) secure web portal, providing worldwide access for soldiers and their families to official information that often cannot be published on the internet.

The system has changed the way the Army can access and communicate information, and has improved morale among troops on operations through secure web-based email, message boards and instant messaging to keep in touch with home. The portal provides a one-stop shop for all operational, routine business and welfare information across the organisation. Some 56,000 soldiers are using ArmyNet, from operations in Iraq, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and the Balkans.

The system is based on open source technologies, which reduces the cost of integration with existing applications, such as the Army’s content management system. The project has been such a success that the MoD is considering it as a model for use across the entire defence community.

British Waterways

British Waterways (BW) manages some 2,000 miles of canals and rivers, and plans to increase its revenue by doubling the number of water users between 2002 and 2012.

This initiative led to the introduction of a new IT infrastructure to allow a map-driven system where users could click on a map and access all the relevant information associated with property or assets at that location. This also involved replacing old hardware and disparate, unconnected databases.

BW awarded a £20m, 10-year contract to LogicaCMG to implement and support SAP
software across the organisation, integrated to a geographical information system from supplier ESRI.

An 80-strong team completed the project in under a year. The original business case forecast a 19 per cent net present value return on the investment, but a recent review suggests that this will now reach 32 per cent.

Merseyside and Cheshire Cancer Registry

The UK’s nine cancer registries are responsible for tracking all individual cases of the disease from first diagnosis, and compiling statistics and information for use by health organisations.

Merseyside and Cheshire Cancer Registry (MCCR) covers a region with 2.4 million citizens, holding more than 600,000 records and registering 16,500 cancers per year.

The key to the organisation’s work is collecting and analysing data to provide meaningful information that will help the work of health professionals.

This was not being achieved as effectively as possible using old manual collection and re-entry processes for data coming from a variety of sources.

MCCR implemented integration software from supplier InterSystems to allow the automatic collection of data in multiple formats, such as email or XML, into a single system.

The project will help cancer control by allowing faster report generation and the use of more recent data, gathered more quickly, accurately and securely.

Qualifications and Curriculum Authority

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) is the government education agency responsible for overseeing the GCSE and A-level exams and national tests at age 7, 11 and 14. In 2003, QCA launched a six-year, £29m project to build an IT system for delivering on-screen tests to 4,000 secondary schools, and to develop a new practical IT test for 14-year olds.

This year, a national pilot covering more than 45,000 pupils was completed, proving the process from registering to completing the tests.

The system is currently installed in some 700 schools, and will rise to 4,000 by 2007. The project has reduced operational costs per pupil from £7.20 for comparable paper-based tests to £4.60, and aims to implement on-screen exams in all secondary schools in England.

In the future, the system may be extended to other examinations, as well as a further 30,000 colleges and primary schools. It is also attracting interest from overseas education bodies.

Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council

IN 1999 and 2002, Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council was heavily criticised by the Benefit Fraud Inspectorate (BFI) for an underperforming benefits service. In response, the council set up a joint venture company with BT, called RBT, to overhaul the operation.

Over the past 12 months, RBT has invested in a major update of the IT system supporting the authority’s benefits service, and has introduced new ways of working. The result is an integrated benefits system that automatically links with housing, council tax, document imaging and financial systems to deliver significant performance improvements.

The average time for processing new claims has been cut from 31 days to 25, and the service has moved from a two-star to a four-star rating in the national assessments of local authorities.

The BFI’s latest report, published earlier this year, praised the council for its ’remarkable performance’. And Rotherham has been selected to lead the national eBenefits programme run by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

South Eastern Trains

South Eastern Trains runs services from stations across Kent and the south-east. When the service was taken back into government control in 2003 because of its franchise owner’s poor performance, the Strategic Rail Authority decided that a complete IT overhaul was needed.

The KESNet project introduced a network infrastructure connecting 158 stations for the first time, and allowed the consolidation of servers that had been spread across 10 sites.

The organisation also implemented a centralised database of season tickets, accessible from any location on the network, that allows customers more flexibility in renewing their tickets. Staff have access to up-to-date information on train services, and networked CCTV is improving safety at stations. Control of assets has also been improved.

A post-implementation review found that KESNet has delivered more than double the benefits outlined in its original business case.

Venerable Bede Secondary School

Venerable Bede Secondary School has been established as Sunderland’s school of the future.

The school has installed a converged voice, data and video network based on Cisco technology, supporting more than 400 PCs, 100 IP telephones, interactive whiteboards in every classroom and plasma screens around the campus.

The network supports systems such as student records and timetables, and every pupil and staff member has their own login access to emails and file storage. A school intranet allows video and live TV to be broadcast to every PC and whiteboard.

The school is also introducing fingerprint scanning for library books and a touch-screen music library, and is testing an iris scanning system for cashless school meals, which will also prevent pupils with allergies from being given the wrong food. An electronic school register is also planned.

This year’s Computing Awards for Excellence 2005 take place at the Battersea Park Events Arena in London on 16 November. It will be a fantastic night out, so to join us at the ceremony, visit www.computing.co.uk/awards for all the details on how to book a table.