Part 8 – Case Study: Optimizing the Forensic Supply Chain

Welcome to Part 8 of our series, Optimizing Business Models, Enterprise Solutions, and Solution Delivery with DEMO and the Complete Transaction Pattern. This installment provides an in-depth case study on optimizing the forensic supply chain. It showcases how applying the Complete Transaction Pattern (CTP), DEMO, and event-driven methodologies can significantly improve cross-organizational processes, reduce administrative burdens, and increase forensic investigation capacity.

In a European country, the criminal justice domain was tasked with optimizing the forensic supply chain between the police, the public prosecutor’s office, and the national forensic research institute. The goal was to enable faster, better, and more comprehensive forensic investigations. At that time, the supply chain relied heavily on paper forms and emails to request forensic investigations. This process required employees to manually transfer information from multiple information systems onto paper, and then for other employees to re-enter it into other systems, leading to a high administrative burden for all parties involved.

To address these issues, the stakeholders decided to fully digitize the supply chain and develop new systems to support this digital transformation.

Approach

To achieve the digitization of the forensic supply chain, the stakeholders jointly launched a cross-organizational program. The program was tasked with establishing an effective information supply chain between the parties involved. Under this program, each organization initiated its own project to develop a new system that would integrate with the newly designed information supply chain.

The program team began by analyzing the semantics of the supply chain to develop a shared semantic model of the concepts and objects relevant to the forensic supply chain. They also conducted an analysis of the legal frameworks and objectives governing the process. One of the guiding principles for the solution from the overarching target architecture for the criminal justice domain was the application of the Complete Transaction Pattern (CTP) and Service Orientation in designing the new, digitized business model for the supply chain.

The analysis revealed that the forensic supply chain consisted of six essential services: delivering an order for forensic research, providing forensic advice, conducting forensic research, delivering research specifications, transferring a forensic item on request, and receiving a forensic item. These six transactions were deemed sufficient to carry out all forensic investigations within the supply chain, regardless of the specific nature of the research. These six transactions were elaborated upon, resulting in the 4 DEMO aspect models.

Implementation

Based on these aspect models, a roadmap was agreed upon for the execution of the projects by the partners. The essential services and their aspect models played a pivotal role in this planning process. The development process for the projects was optimized by ensuring that the parties involved in a transaction, either as initiators or executors, developed the required features for a transaction simultaneously. This approach allowed them to work in parallel on the events and workflows required to execute the transaction, as well as develop the necessary user stories and view models. These view models were also designed to display information from the systems of partners. The roadmap was reviewed and aligned quarterly during a PI (Program Increment) event with all the projects and served as the framework for the sprint planning of the projects.

Result

Through the program, we’ve developed end-user applications for forensic supply chain employees that are fully integrated with their tasks, as well as with partner applications used in forensic investigations. By reducing the administrative burden, the program is expected to enhance operational capacity and allow forensic teams to manage a higher caseload without increasing staffing.

This case study demonstrates the practical application of CTP, DEMO, Event Modeling, and Agile development in a real-world scenario, showcasing how these methodologies can be effectively combined to optimize business processes and achieve significant operational improvements.

Discover how this journey began in Part 1 – Introduction and Overview. Explore what lies ahead in Part 9 – Conclusion.

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