Wandsworth Council Housing Department realised that to be able to respond to the growing need for management information and statistics from Central Government, enhance the visibility of incidents and provide comprehensive emergency services, it needed to replace its ageing combination of systems with a single efficient application. After initial research identified that an off-the-shelf package would not meet Wandsworth’s needs, a specification for a bespoke software solution was drawn up and subsequently put out to tender. A pressing time constraint of seven months was placed on both Wandsworth Borough Council and Dorset Software.