Shoreham Port, located five miles to the West of Brighton and Hove, is a Trust Port handling some 1.75 million tonnes of cargo annually, producing a £9 million turnover. The Port's main activities are cargo handling, fishing, leisure and a thriving property portfolio. The main cargoes handled are construction materials, such as sawn timber and aggregates, and steel, used in the manufacture of vehicle parts. The principal stevedoring company for the port is Sussex Port Forwarding (SPF) who handle cargoes on behalf of many customers.

SPF’s ageing systems were clearly falling short of the needs of the company, with continuous system failures and increased downtime to recovery. George James were contacted by SPF to provide a solution to control the importing, storage and delivery of cargoes. Initially the focus was on timber, while still allowing other cargoes to be handled without software rewrites. SPF had spoken to the various employee groups and prepared the ground to establish the system requirements. Due to the serious problems, SPF needed their new system to be implemented in a very short timescale.

The project timescale mitigated against development along traditional lines - detailed specifications being produced and agreed at each stage. As a basic requirement of the system was to be the validation of information at source, it was decided to reduce the learning curve by employing George James’ Integrator TM solution as the messaging hub for the system. This freed the team to concentrate on the user interface. The system was developed using SQL Server as the backend database with a Visual Basic interface for the office PCs and C for the hand held terminals.

At the start of the project a roadmap of milestones was established - one milestone per user-delivered module. SPF established a user team to test the system as it was delivered and gradually the SPF team began to refine the requirements with experience and with the close working of the George James team. The teams met on a weekly basis to review and test progress. SPF recognized that the changes would lead to an implementation delay, the price to be paid for a system that actually met the business requirements. In the event, through sound George James project management, the system was implemented on schedule, and the success and robustness of the George James solution has led to extensions to the overall system. Recently a web interface was developed to allow their customer base to have access to their individual stock holding at the port. This has been a major sucess as the port no longer has to handle time consuming phone calls from customers asking about their stock levels.

To raise productivity and accuracy, a Radio Frequency (RF) network was to be introduced across the entire port area - one mile in length by one-fifth of a mile wide. This acreage was problem enough but was compounded by a spread of four locations separated by other unconnected businesses, plus areas of stacked timber creating interference. Using the RF network was a must however, enabling real time data validation to be carried out - an essential for SPF’s operations.

The original solution was an 802.11b RF network, installed by partners Blackroc Technology Ltd, using Datalogic Viper hand held terminals supplied by George James. In order to provide adequate RF coverage within the difficult site configuration, George James optimised network traffic through exclusive text-only message packets, as opposed to full emulation. The result is that full port network was now possible, while at the same time utilising fewer RF antennas, a genuine break through for SPF.

The Port use a combination of 3 different types of data collection terminals. The Viper™ was the first Datalogic pistol grip portable used, followed by the newer Viper.Net terminal, and now they are using the MC9090 (see image).

The way in which we develop our software has allowed Shoreham Port to combine different hand held units for different tasks without having to redevelop the software each time.

The system currently utilises around 40 terminals.

Check out their website which highlights the benefits they have achieved.
www.portshoreham.co.uk