The project brief was to create a system to receive new case start instructions electronically from Lender clients.
Findings
A previous supplier had attempted both a fax/OCR and a webservice based solution, but neither had worked. On inspection of the multitude of inbound fax formats, including hand-written ones, we rapidly concluded that the fax/OCR route was a waste of time.
Solution
We contacted the lenders and picked up on the work they'd started and implemented a SOAP webservice with C# in Visual Studio 2005 which conformed to their interface and schema specifications. Inbound requests are stored in a SQL Server 2005 workflow database and routed to Solcase, the case management system, using a palette of Microsoft technologies including Windows Scripting Host, JScript, ADO, COM and OLEDB as well as the Solcase custom scripting language.
On receipt of a new start instruction, a new case is created in Solcase and a new request is enqueued to the Land Registry, firstly to resolve the address to a title number, and if that is returned as a unique title number then a second call is automatically issued for the Official Copy of the Register using an electronic process documents in another project: "Electronic Land Registry Requests".
The value of this system is that it eliminates manual and error prone re-keying work and so reduces case processing costs and improves quality. It also speeds the processing of cases and improves lender relations.