IT company PDMS has been appointed by Transport for London (TfL) to develop and implement a new lost property system.

The contract has been awarded through the Buying Solutions Framework.

The new application, to go live mid-2010, will provide real time information on lost property so that items can be returned to customers quickly and efficiently. 

The system includes a browser-based user interface so that customers can register a lost item and search for their own lost items via the Internet.  The new lost property system will help cope with an anticipated increase in lost property.

PDMS’ solution is based on FoundationsTM, the company’s own software development framework, which means the company can deliver a high performance application faster, cheaper and more efficiently than a bespoke or off-the-shelf solution. 

Chris Gledhill, PDMS' Managing Director, explains, "We offer a better alternative to conventional licensing models.

"Numbers of users or CPUs are not a particularly good measure of the value of an application, and conventional licensing models for enterprise software can be a very significant barrier to the roll out of successful solutions.

"We take a solution, or project-based, view of licensing for FoundationsTM.  This effectively removes many roadblocks to rapidly expanding access to applications that work well."

FoundationsTM provides comprehensive object relational mapping, domain modelling and interface / user management capabilities optimised for the Microsoft Enterprise environment.

The framework drastically reduces the amount of coding required when compared with a bespoke solution, and in practice is also simpler to implement, cheaper and less restrictive than most projects based on the integration of ‘off the shelf’ software packages.

TfL handles over 220,000 pieces of lost property each year from London’s buses, the Tube, London Overground, the Docklands Light Railway, taxis and Victoria Coach Station.