Our history:

In late 1981, Thoughtware Publishing Company, Inc. was formed and began business providing software publishing and distribution for third parties. That same year it acquired the rights to Data Train, Inc. accounting systems. Based on three separate hardware architectures (Wang, NCR & Tandy/ Radio Shack), the systems included General Ledger, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Fixed Assets, Inventory and Payroll modules. This forced the addition of internal development capabilities to continue the development and support of accounting systems. It began by porting them to CPM and MPM. In 1982, the NCR system was ported to Xenix. In 1983 and 1984, all three systems were ported to MS-DOS.

In 1983, 1984, and 1985 PC Magazine rated the MS-DOS version of the NCR design as the best micro-accounting system in the world. Thoughtware Publishing's reputation continued to grow. In 1984 the World Bank, through the auspices of Price Waterhouse, contracted Thoughtware Publishing to design and implement a General Ledger System which could support 999 trillion dollar fields, international currency conversions, 12 digit account numbers and multiple language display screens in a world networked environment. The first installation was in Ankara, Turkey and the screens were in Turkish. Subsequently, between 1984 and 1989, the system was installed in 76 countries in a range of languages.

Many of the modules were extended for different industry segments. During the remainder of the 80's, Thoughtware Publishing developed numerous banking systems, municipal accounting systems, and specialty accounts receivable and inventory modules for the NCR based system resulting in the assignment of 58 ISBN numbers for the accounting systems being published. Moore Forms, Inc. reported in 1988 that they had over 30,000 customers using the forms required by its accounting systems. Deluxe Forms, Inc. reported a slightly less number of customers.

In 1989, Thoughtware Publishing underwent a major restructuring emerging as today's Thought, Systems Consulting & Engineering, Inc. A major lumber company, Weyerhaeuser, contracted it to automate their inventory and accounts receivable systems. The final result of the two year project was significantly greater: a lumber mill automation and accounting system from the standing tree to the shipping dock. It featured a log inventory tracking system that used embedded transponders with enough memory to store an inventory number and the logs' board footage. The information was retrieved just prior to the log being sawed. Lasers were then used to determine the dimensions of incoming logs. The dimensions were used to validate the recorded board footage and to calculate the best dollar value obtainable from possible cuts (i.e. 2x10's are more valuable than 2x4's). This information was then used to control the sawing process. Subsequent cuts were done using similar technologies. The lumber was graded using lasers that scanned the surfaces for imperfections. Then the lumber was then bar-coded by the stick and the bundle. Finally, transponders were used for in yard inventory tracking. As each bundle passed by the shipping point, the bundle ID was retrieved. For the first time in history, a mill was able to determine the actual profit from a single tree. The system was featured on the front page of many timber and lumber industry magazines. It was installed in numerous mills in the Pacific Northwest at an average cost of over $1M per mill. However, the systems' costs were recouped from the mills' abilities to generate their invoices within minutes of fulfilling their orders and the improved dollar yields from the computerized sawing.

In 1991, because of its work with lasers, Thought was contracted by MetOne to develop software for the first generation of recording laser particle counters for use in the clean room, pharmaceutical and chemical industries. In 1992, because of the inspection system that it developed for the lumber mill project, Thought was contracted by Heyco Metals to develop quality control hardware and software for a specialty metals rolling mill. The mill primarily produced the copper base for the computer chip industry. The system measured the width and thickness of the copper strips and scanned both surfaces for imperfections, recording the information for retrieval by the buyer.

In 1993, a major religious organization, American Baptist Churches, USA approached Thought to downsize it The analysis revealed that the cost of implementing an existing commercial system was beyond the organization's budget because of the per seat costs. Thought was asked to write an object oriented database system which would handle the current and future needs of the organization. This project lasted three years, resulting in an Internet ready Virtual Object Management System. The system OORAD required defining the object relationships of both a major organization and a database management system and resulted in a 7000 page software design utilizing the OMT methodology. Although based on the MFC classes, the system required creating VC++ objects for all the major data types, i.e. integer, for which there were no existing prototypes, in addition to the database objects, culminating in 500,000 lines of VC++ code.

In 1996, Thought was contracted to create an Internet based real estate web site that could dynamically create mini-web sites that would provide streaming multimedia tours and details of homes for sale. The project required creating a web server farm with multiple T3's Internet access. The site is totally Microsoft based with IIS, NetShow, VB ASP, DAO, and SQL. The web server farm is Microsoft FrontPage certified and is accessible at www.thoughts.net. The prototype real estate site is currently available at www.activehome.net.

In February of 1998, Thought began developing for Interactive Flight Technologies a Passengers & Applications Server / Manager and application's SDK for an interactive in-flight airline entertainment system used by Swiss Air and other airlines. The server / manager coordinates the menu creation and application execution of on demand video, audio, video games, gambling and other passenger applications on a per seat basis applying age, seat, ticket class and frequent flyer constraints while providing usage statistics.

In June 1998, Thought began a short term project for Axxess Technologies providing the architecture for a toolbox of generic software components that was used to develop a variety of consumer product kiosks. The toolbox consisted of components for handling credit card and cash acceptors, remote diagnostics and management, session management, internationalization of language and currency and a soft keyboard across multiple platforms and hardware configurations.

From September 1998 until April 1999, Thought designed the framework architecture for a specialized COTS enterprise resource planning and management system (ERPM) for K-12 school districts for National Computer Systems / Pearson Education. The framework incorporated Microsoft's DNA and COM+ technologies and will be use as the basis for all future application development by a $600M+ corporation.

From July 1999 to October 1999, Thought performed an independent, interim project assessment of the US Department of Labor's "Integrated Federal Employees' Compensation System" redesign project of 25 separate applications into a new system based on a modern architecture. The scope of the assessment included the project management processes & methodology, development processes and methodology, and the project's current analysis and design artifacts. The assessment resulted in a revised Implementation Plan and the specification of the project's Software Architecture Document. Additional services included customized OOPM and OORAD training and mentoring, for both management and project staff, based on the RUP and UML.

During the millennial winter of 2000, Thought performed an architectural assessment of a current large-scale newspaper and magazine publishing system that was to be modified to meet the user and technical requirements of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal worldwide. The outcome of assessment resulted in the development of an architectural functional specification for a new generation of that product and the architectural overview of the development of a 40 chapter, 3000 page product functional specification. Further responsibilities included development of the project plan, with both development and deployment schedules and costs, and OOPM and OOAD training and mentoring, for both management and project staff, based on the RUP and UML.

From September 2000 through February 2001, Thought performed high-level consulting and mentoring to Aetna in their efforts to move towards object-orientation and the deployment of the Rational Unified Process with the Rational Suite. Beyond extensive mentoring of RUP and UML and contributing to the Aetna Development Case, Thought also wrote the guidelines for selecting pilot projects and created an interactive project assistance assessment system. The major focus of its efforts was defining their future development environment and modeling relevant portions of their IT processes, especially processes for integrating and synchronizing project and enterprise development models. Concurrently during October thru December 2000, Thought also performed an architectural assessment with detailed recommendations of Prometric's (Thomson Learning) Internet testing solutions to support a new direction in marketing their services.

For the remainder of 2001 and early 2002, Thought pursued the development of a commercial development process product for estimating and tracking Rational Unified Process projects.

During the period from March to May, 2001, Thought prepared and provided a pro-bono future cast for the Coalition for Affordable Quality Healthcare (CAQH) to use to develop a RFP for projected outsourced services to be provided to the coalition. CAQH is a coalition of 24 of America's largest health plans and insurers working together to help improve the health care experience for consumers and physicians. The future cast incorporated the industry's current need for a singular healthcare professionals' credential database. The future cast also projected the need for a common real-time, Application Services Provider (ASP) service providing four major sub-systems effecting the quality and affordability of healthcare: Credentialing, Privileging, Authorization and Formulary. The management of these four concerns directly affects the quality and potential liability for delivery of medical services. The future cast incorporated existing and immerging hardware and software technologies including smart cards, PDA's, transponders and the connectivity of the Internet to provide a more powerful solution by insuring: that both the facility and practitioner were qualified today to perform the procedure; that the associated formulary was appropriate for the procedure and patient; that the prescriptions were correctly and securely transmitted to the pharmacy; and that the procedure would be fiscally covered.

From April, 2002, to April 2003, after performing an assessment of the current state of deployment and training within GMAC Insurance of the Rational Unified Process, Thought furthered the deployment and training, in conjunction with mentoring, of GMAC Insurances enterprise re-invent project teams which are using the methodology. Concurrently, Thought completed the development of its commercial development process product, "Project Estimation & Tracking for the Rational Unified Process".

Since September of 2003, Thought has been working with the Digital Infuzion to prepare its project teams to conduct a project for the National Institutes of Health Division of AIDS using the Rational Unified Process, the Rational Suite and Rational XDE for Visual Studio .NET, specifically tailoring the process for use with the .NET architecture while training and mentoring the teams in the methodology and modeling as well as acting as providing IBM/Rational Systems administration services in a distributed development environment of sub-contractors and remoting workers.

During the summer of 2005, Thought simultaneously worked with the State of Massachusetts' Executive Office of Heath and Human Services' Department of Transitional Services by training and mentoring their IT staff in the methodology and modeling while also helping them begin to define their Development Case.

Most recently, as a result of the response needs of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, in the fall of 2005 and working again with Digital Infuzion, Thought wrote for the US Department of Health and Human Services a Vision document and performed the high level design for a new development project, the Critical Infrastructure Data System (CIDS).