History

British Airways, 1986 – BABS Data Loading Interface

The BABS Data Loading Interface was engineered to circumvent the extreme complexity of maintaining data in the British Airways BABS Tours Database. As a result of the development, the necessary skill level required by operators was reduced and the error prone manual mediation mechanism was automated.
The system removed the dependence on expensive technical staff to carry out the complex but mundane task of direct BABS Tours data entry, by splitting the system into two logical sections; data entry and BABS Tours database mediation. This resulted in higher productivity and lower cost.

BRaLS Ltd, Baggage Reconciliation And Location System (BRaLS)

BRaLS was a baggage reconciliation system designed specifically to counter scenarios such as the Lockerbie bombing. As a side benefit the problem of lost bags was largely alleviated as all baggage was tracked and its exact location known to the system. Ingeneering were responsible for the entire design, development and implementation of this system.
All bags were bar-coded at entry and scanned by the baggage loaders with a mixture of radio and direct connection bar-code readers. The Lockerbie bomb was planted by a bomber with a ticket to America: He boarded the plane at Frankfurt, flew to London Heathrow where he was supposed to change planes. He never re-boarded but his baggage was loaded on to the flight to America; The rest is history. BRaLS specifically disallowed baggage without an accompanying passenger. If BRaLS had been installed, the bag would have been detected and removed. Patents for parts of the design including our work are in place worldwide.
BRaLS was delivered to the customer in 1991. The patents encompassed within the BRaLS development are owned by the British Technology Group (BTG) and the entire system was sold by BTG to Ferranti who carried out further developments. Ultra Electronics have also based designs on those patents and hence our original ideas.

British Telecom

Call Management Information

Ingeneering is the key software supplier for the BT Call Management Information Service. The service provides small business customers with monthly high quality call analysis reports including detailed tables and colour graphs. Rapid development and launch was critical to BT to protect their biggest accounts which were being lost to a similar, but smaller, service from Energis. BT selected Ingeneering as the sole developer to design and develop the software for them. The system is dimensioned to collect 54,000,000 call records per day from 2,000 logging sites nationwide and generate 100,000 four page colour PostScript reports per month (Europe’s largest out-sourced printing contract). For our part in the rapid and successful launch of the service, BT presented us with a “Rising to the Challenge” award at a special ceremony at the BT Tower in London.
BT are currently planning internet access to these reports with our involvement that of sole developer.
CMI was installed, operational and supported in 1996 and has run continuously without major incident. CMI is still current.

Value Added Network Billing Engine (VANBE)

VANBE is a telephony billing engine, pricing call records and storing them in an Oracle RDBMS. Using configuration information, billing records are generated dependant on details such as account and departmental structures. The system also includes a sales ledger facility designed to hold periodic charges such as handset rentals, line rentals and moves and changes. An audit facility keeps track of the total number and cost of calls throughout the system in order to highlight discrepancies.
VANBE was installed, operational and supported in 1991.

Least Cost Route Billing

Ingeneering developed a short term bridging solution enabling BT to provide a least cost routing solution for calls exploiting an in-house facility to gain business in their international markets.
A core deliverable of this project was our own high performance high accuracy billing engine. We were able to deliver a lean and effective solution in very short time-scales. The billing engine is part of our product portfolio.

Revenue Apportionment And Accounting System

The Revenue Apportionment and Accounting System (RAA) extracted call accounting information on a per district basis from the incoming and outgoing routes of Public Telephone Switches.
Its purpose was to enable digital exchange revenue information to be collected, processed and output to the end user’s specifications. Data was supplied weekly via magnetic media, processed, validated and then stored in the system’s database implemented with the Ingres RDBMS.
The System had one local and a number of remote users. The local user performed the function of system administration and had the ability to produce a number of reports based on the data stored in the database. The remote users had the ability to obtain reports by querying the database, gaining access via one of four modems connected to the Public Switched Telephone network.
RAA was installed, operational and supported in 1988 and ran continuously without major incident until it was finally turned off as planned at the end of 1991.

Inter Network Call Accounting (INCA)

INCA was based on the RAA technology, and was similar in execution. It’s objective was to extract call accounting information from the incoming/outgoing routes on a per Other Licensed Operator (OLO) basis. It was a prototype for a much larger system.
INCA was installed, operational and supported in 1989 and ran continuously without major incident until it was finally turned off as planned at the end of 1991.

Analogue Total Information Exchange Sample (TIES)

Analogue TIES is a sub system of the TIES system. Analogue TIES consists of a central data collection site supporting up to 500 remote data logging sites dedicated to collecting statistics concerning analogue telephone line usage. This was achieved with line scanning technology and was collected nightly by the central site over a dial-back modem link.
Analogue TIES information was sent to a Mainframe site for further processing. Its use was for marketing purposes such as: An advertising campaign would be mounted and TIES data would be used to monitor the National Call Profile so as to quantify the effects of the campaign.
Analogue TIES was installed, operational and supported from March 1986 and ran continuously without major incident until it was finally turned off at the end of March 1996.

Digital Total Information Exchange Sample (DTIES)

DTIES carried out the same function as that carried out by Analogue TIES with the difference of supporting only digital switches. The analogue sample from Analogue TIES was decreasing due to the decommissioning of the old analogue switches and their replacement with new Digital Switches. DTIES provided the corresponding (and larger) digital sample.
Digital TIES was installed, operational and supported in 1991 and ran continuously without major incident until it was finally turned off at the end of March 1996.

Fastpath

Fastpath was conceived to quickly collect and analyse accounting information from Public Telephone Switches. Each Fastpath machine was able to cope from data from up to 64 public switches from up to four data streams. The regional Operations and Maintenance Centres (OMCs) collected the data from the switches, multiplexed it together and passed it to Fastpath.
Fastpath relied on a proprietary database design optimised for both speed and the restriction on space demanded by the minimally configured machines.
Fastpath was installed, operational and supported in August 1987 and ran continuously without major incident until it was finally turned off at the end of June 1991.

Corsellis-Montford Interactive

CMi (Corsellis-Montford Interactive) provide a range of Web Services including innovative graphic design, the ‘activation’ of sites using sophisticated database techniques and other added value services and were industry pathfinders in these areas. Ingeneering were responsible for the design and development of their Remote Content Management System (RCM) and their ‘Auctions On Line’ and ‘Hotels’ services, with RCM enabling CMi to offer a set of core services to multiple customers using an easy-to-manage interface. CMi was acquired by New Media Industries Group plc in 2000.

GPT

GPT act as a value added reseller for the Ingeneering system for the collection and analysis of data from System X Public Switches. The product is based on the re-use of and database configuration of many parts of the Ingeneering ADAM technology base. GPT have made worldwide sales of this product.
All installations are supported.

Soft Options

Soft Options are an Internet Application development house featuring a skilled team of graphic designers and offer Internet Presence and associated services to industry. The following outlines some of the projects we have carried out for Soft Options.
Chemistry And Industry (CNI)
Ingeneering undertook the re-engineering of the inefficient CNI website email delivery service. Before re-engineering the system took 28 hours to process the daily mail log and our work reduced this to less than 1 hour. We achieved this as well as simultaneously adding significant extra features which increased the complexity of the mail run. The customer is now delighted.
The CNI re-engineering was installed, operational and supported in late 1996 and has run continuously without major incident. CNI is still current.

Shell Aviation Airfields (STASCO)

Ingeneering developed a system to publish an inventory of all their airfield stores worldwide and make the information available on their intranet.
STASCO was installed, operational and supported in March 1997 and has ran continuously without major incident.

Mercury Asset Management (MAM)

This system accepted stocks and share prices via encrypted email; the email was processed and the extracted data inserted into an Oracle database. This information was used to update a large internet website. Extensive use of the Ingeneering PGC was employed to reduce development time.
MAM was installed, operational and supported in February 1997 until MAM’s takeover by Merrill Lynch.

Investors In People (IIP)

Ingeneering completed the development of an intranet pilot to assist a major UK Telecoms Service provider to comply with the ‘Investors in People’ requirements. The system holds personal training and development details. Users of the system can search the development and training database within their own personal context. Any development options found can be added to their personal portfolio for approval by their manager; once the course is completed it can be recorded in their development and training histories. Users can explore what they might like to do and how in terms of training they might go about achieving their goals. The final system will scale to embrace the entire workforce of around 120,000 as well as a large number of development and training suppliers.

Ericsson

Ingeneering has been involved with Ericsson since 1997. Ingeneering has designed, developed, delivered and supported an innovative Least Cost Routing system based on Oracle 8 using a client/server architecture. The system takes advantage of the sophisticated routing mechanisms offered by the Ericsson AXE switches and is designed to support other switches in future. The system has been sold to many companies such as WorldCom and is designed to increase the margin on all calls by making the most effective carrier selection for every call to every destination.
Ericsson perceive this project as a competitive edge in selling Public Switches and other Ericsson services. The project was initially undertaken with a six month turnaround from a clean sheet to delivery to customer, achieved on time and on budget. Ericsson are always seeking ways of improving their supplier relationships and hence the delivered product. Ericsson QA team use regular low impact supplier relationship evaluation and suppliers are encouraged to identify areas requiring improvement with Ericsson procedures as well as improving their own. This open and constructive attitude benefits all; Better customer-supplier relations result in better products in less time for less money.

SmartAxis

Ingeneering was selected by Unisource AT&T to develop reference software for the SmartAxis project. We were the lead developer for many aspects of the system including the entire back office suite. SmartAxis established relationships with Mondex, Clipper and Proton and various banks; SmartAxis was intended to become the standard payment method for digital cash on the internet, however credit card companies found ways to mitigate the SmartAxis business model rendering the concept unprofitable.