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NICESheriffs is the first register of High Court Judgments. It establishes a cab rank for High Court Writs of Fieri Facias addressed to the High Court Enforcement Officers of England and Wales to ensure that if a Judgment Creditor wants to use the cab rank, the Writ will be assigned using the technology embedded in the NICE system.

The other functions of NICE involve:

• Creating a register of all High Court Writs of Fieri Facias
• Cross matching these Writs with all issued insolvency notices under Rule 12.19 of the Insolvency Rules
• Establishing priorities between all Writs sent to the High Court for enforcement
• Allowing statistical analysis of High Court Writ information - which is transparent to Government and to the Judiciary

NICESheriffs began operating on 1 April 2004 at the same time the new High Court Enforcement Officer Regulations came into operation.

Since that time it has registered all the High Court Writs, established priorities between the newly competing High Court enforcement businesses, as well as recording all 80,000 insolvency notices served in accordance with the Rules by over 1500 sets of insolvency practitioners, Official Receivers and Trustees in Bankruptcy.

NICESheriffs offers a positive set of outcomes for the Government in the development of High Court enforcement without the need for public funding. It is an independent database of enforcement information which gathers statistics and monitors performance and is fully accessible and transparent to Government and judiciary alike.

So how does India come into the story? Well, it became very apparent in the middle of May 2004 that we were going to be hard pressed to input all the insolvency information as well as develop our enforcement model "Sherforce" using the same set of resources.

Our Indian technology partners, Cressanda Solutions Limited, offered us an opportunity to map the process of inputting the insolvency information and then outsourcing the routine to a newly trained team of four people in Delhi.

As the saying goes "Necessity is often the mother of invention". In our model, the need to develop software in readiness for the new enacted High Court Enforcement Officer Regulations 2004, allowed us to combine software development with an outsourced business process, as the first stage of a new dimension to our business - BPO - Business Process Outsourcing.

The mapping of the business process allowed us to put in place a simple but practical system for classifying, scanning, entering, saving and cross matching all insolvency data in the NICESheriffs system.

Now every day insolvency notices are classified and scanned out to India. The India team download the folders of scanned images and enter the data into the NICESheriffs system.

Weekly reports confirm the amount of data entered and the type of insolvencies which are held in the system.

Looking back this was a system definitely born out of necessity to get the job done. Going forward, we have been able to transplant this simple system into other Shergroup projects.

In the Sheriffs Lodgment Centre model, our new instructions are scanned and sent to India for input, or picked up from our website entries. Under our Sherforce brand, our entire daily set of communications are now logged, and actioned in Delhi, leaving our UK teams to handle "front of house" client relationships.

Simply put, the need to develop a modern and highly managed enforcement office in a climate of increasing regulation requires a complete re-think on how services are delivered.

Of course as managers we have worried about the impact of this on our UK staff. My experience has been that by being open and honest, my UK teams have embraced the India experience with the utmost professionalism and genuine willingness to see Project Taj Mahal succeed. Exchanges of team members between the UK and Delhi and increasing use of webcams, and Yahoo have enabled us to build close working relationships with our Indian counterparts.

Outsourcing offshore can keep labour costs in check. Outsourced labour including management time is typically 30-40% less expensive than the same UK model. But costs savings are only part of the story.

Business Outsourcing Processing is a management science, with managers, team leaders and staff in India joining in the experience of measuring quality and output at a level we would never have been able to achieve in the UK. We are learning so much from our Indian partners and in turn our service delivery is beginning to move to the platform we all strive for.

There has been natural concern to such a huge investment, and it takes time and patience to iron out the wrinkles from any new process particularly in a climate of change and new legislation.

Advances in speed and security do enable small and medium size businesses to re-design the delivery of back office processes so they can be sent anywhere in the world. Businesses of any size can look at taking advantage of cost savings, time zones, skill sets, and willingness to do the work, free of UK labour laws.

BPO may seem a management fad to some, but for our business we are combining the programming of our system, with onsite input of how to continually improve the process which gives a better and better service to our clients.

We never imagined that our commitment to NICESheriffs would have such far reaching consequences, but we are delighted with the consequences of taking the risk.