Alstom Renovation, a member of the Alstom transport group, is a leading train renovator and provide a host of options in maintenance, renovation and parts services for rolling stock (passenger & freight).

Currently Alstom Renovation has five UK sites of which three are using the Cincom manufacturing software solution, with plans to extend to the other sites. All data entry was done manually and it was recognised that this was time consuming and was leading to inaccurate data.

Alstom had invested heavily in the Cincom manufacturing software. They recognised that the key to the success of the Cincom implementation was the accuracy of the data within the system.

The Alstom implementation team recognised that the entry of data into the Cincom database was taking too much time and effort and they also wanted to improve the accuracy of the data. Alstom recognised that capturing the data at source, without any transcribing, was key to achieving the required accuracy and that there would be minimal delay in entering the data into the database.

As Alstom renovation had limited experience of barcoding and data capture they turned to recognised experts in the field. A prime requirement was that whatever they implemented would have to be flexible and scaleable to adapt to their changing requirements.

The size of the stores areas and the nature of the materials and products held in the stores meant that fixed terminals were not viable.

George James’ experience led them to believe that Radio Frequency (RF) provided the most flexible approach to the problem and the Datalogic Viper handheld terminals was the most suitable data capture device.

Seven main functions carried out within the stores were identified by Alstom, these were mapped to the Cincom transactions and the required data identified . The link between the Viper terminals and the HP 9000TM computer that runs the Cincom manufacturing software is provided by George James’ Integrator software product, which acts as the message hub. The Integrator provides flexible message routing that allows the origin of a terminals data to be identified and routed to the appropriate area of the Cincom database.