Scottish Court Service

The requirement was to replace a legacy case management application first installed in 1990. Although highly successful, the legacy system was at end of life and would not support the increasing requirements for legislative change, performance monitoring and efficiency improvements sought by the customer.

The customer's business challenge was to procure and implement a replacement Case/Account Management system for use by up to 900 users across the 49 Sheriff Courts in Scotland.


Our Solution

Our solution went beyond the replacement of the system and our approach was to develop a modern, fresh and reliable case/account management system to provide the customer with the innovation that they sought.

The application architecture was rethought and moved from a thick client / server implementation with regional servers to a multi tier web based application running in a browser supported by a single national data server.

The application development was undertaken in Oracle Forms and Reports10g using Oracle 10gAS and an Oracle 9i RDBMS.

The architecture was rethought primarily because of the constraints inherent in a regionalised data structure and the barriers this presented to an efficient national solution.

Key features / benefits of the new application are as follows:

• The concept of an electronic case file with the ability to attach relevant documentation to the case file including scanned documents
• Single nominal record for each individual allows for efficient management of fines and warrants nationally
• Each accused can have multiple financial accounts with a single accused global account view available at a glance.
• Extensive court programming/diary functionality
• User maintainable workflow processes that combine results, auto text paragraphs and associated documentation
• Highly flexible user configurable documentation
• Ability to email documents to and from the application and attach to the case file
• Bar coding of case files
• New and innovative modules to fully manage post disposal applications including appeals, bail applications and breaches.
• Seamless electronic transfer of cases/accounts between courts
• Development of interfaces between criminal justice agencies including automatic notification to the police of case disposals and instantaneous notification of bail conditions/bail condition changes
• Design of complete end user training courses
• Development of detailed user manuals and on line help
• Automatic conversion of legacy case and account details into the new system