In 1987, John McMillan was approached by Guildford Borough Council who wanted software to monitor town planning enforcement. Guildford wanted the software to be marketed as a package. McMillan Technology developed a package written in C++ using the Btrieve (Pervasive) data base.
The enforcement process is very complex and varies between councils. To accommodate this, McMillan designed a set of rules which allowed the process to be specified in an ISO 9000 style. This was highly successful.
The package was marketed by McMillan Technology under the name of cCOPE and was sold to more than 20 of the 300 district councils in England. It is still in use in 2008.