What is needed is a fresh look at the business processes, so that efficiencies are driven into the entire business process supporting the organisation - at the most basic level this is Straight Through Processing (STP).

What does it mean?

STP is all about the integrating and streamlining of business processes in a move towards the goal of creating "a highly efficient business entity" while increasing the control and effectiveness in which a business interacts with its tenants, suppliers, regulatory bodies and anyone who is connected with the operation of an association.

The key goal if to cut down the amount of manual intervention that is required to take a business operation from identification through to completion. This offers a number of benefits including:

	The ability for operations, maintenance, finance, Funders and management, etc to access the information that they require specific to their job function without creating new reports each time
	Reducing the amount of mistakes made by human error
	Standardisation of procedures – resulting in, amongst other things, reduced staff training times
	Increasing the performance of working operations and the ability to monitor the performance
	Improved Cost and Time Efficiencies – the need for paper based information and processing will be reduced dramatically. In addition to this, all areas will be informed quicker, enabling a more efficient processing of the business.
	Identification of bottlenecks – The process can be monitored more effectively, enabling both the managers and staff to identify inefficiencies that can be smoothed out so that they don’t affect the speed of the overall process.

Example

During the processing of invoices for repairs - this information may be keyed in once on receipt of the claim and then passed through a number of stages before it is finally accounted for and funds allocated. The stages it goes through may involve several systems and departments, each with their own set of procedures.

One approach is to automate the capture and routing of the invoice by using work flow technologies. However, this will not be sufficient as information may be required to be updated and processed in other disparate systems.  Increasingly, the need to integrate the business processes is becoming vital to enable the changes in the work practice. The latter will be particularly important as the e-commerce initiatives mature.   

Our offering within STP

Every association continues to develop its businesses as quickly and as efficiently as possible. With the ever increasing demand for information and cost reduction, automation can often be the only viable solution. 

However, incorporation of new technology is not simply about installing a piece of software and new hardware. It is time consuming and does require tight project management and qualified resources to ensure that the benefits are quickly realised.

At ILLY we regard our business clients as our partners and to whom we offer a guaranteed service which is based on our three founding principles:

Customers are the reason we exist

Quality is not for compromise

Focus and Delivery are our Strength

As a professional software house, we believe in delivering a production quality solution to our clients using a tried and tested methodology. This includes:

	Clearly understanding the business and technical requirements.
	Recommending business solutions which will meet the requirements and enable future expansion using the most up-to-date technologies.
	Guaranteeing a fixed price and delivery to meet our client's expectations.
	Tailored training and service levels to ensure independent usage of the system