To Bespoke or Not To Bespoke? That is the question.

The Material Accountability System is used to monitor the movement and processing of all accountable nuclear material held on behalf of the Ministry of Defence (MoD), processed by the Submarines business. The existing system was created in the mid 80’s. It is written in COBOL and operates on an HP3000 platform. The system is business critical as it is a contractual requirement for the MoD. Vendor support from Hewlett Packard for the system hardware and software will cease at the end of 2010. The diminishing level of support for the existing system represents a high level of risk. The purpose of the MARS project is to find a suitable replacement system satisfying all of the business and process requirements. The principal objectives of a Replacement Material Accountability System are to reduce the support required from Rolls-Royce chosen service providers EDS and mitigate the associated risk. Bespoke, Commercial off the Shelf (C.O.T.S.) and the opportunity to migrate the existing system onto a modern platform have been investigated. A literature review was completed to examine if similar activities have been undertaken by other industries. The opportunity to complete analysis of both a bespoke solution and a C.O.T.S. solution has been taken. The analysis methodology used was a strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities (SWOT) analysis. These were assessed and then a hybrid solution was also discussed and taken forward as the most appropriate solution for the MARS project. There are no software solutions available commercially to satisfy the requirements of the project. Other solutions that are available would be based upon a C.O.T.S. model, but any gaps would be resolved by a bespoke solution. It was considered appropriate to use the 80 - 20 rule. If 80% of the functionality was C.O.T.S. then the remaining 20% could be configured. The 20% must be configuration not customisation. The configuration should allow the solution to be supported by a wide range of people and organisations but also take advantage of any system upgrades without the 20% configuration having to be rewritten.