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.

By December 2001, 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 by April 2002.

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 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 only four weeks behind schedule, in May 2002 and the success and robustness of the George James solution has led to extensions to the overall system with further phases planned for the future.

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 solution was a 802.11b RF network, installed by partners Blackroc Technology Ltd., using Datalogic Viper TM 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 is now possible, while at the same time utilising fewer RF antennas, a genuine break through for SPF.

The Viper™ is the first Datalogic pistol grip portable RF terminal in a new generation of "mobile@work™" rugged products. It is a powerful and robust portable pistol grip radio terminal which is light-weight, equipped with internal antenna, well-balanced and shaped to fit the hand providing the best user comfort in its product class.

The system currently utilises around 20 Viper™ terminals.

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