April/May 2002

Seafield roll-out advances

Now well into its roll-out phase in Seafield Holdings' 165,000 sq ft Claylands warehouse is a turnkey warehouse management system from Microlise. It is built round the Opus warehouse management system, which is running under HP-UX on a Hewlett Packard HP9000 L-class computer cluster (bearing "highly available and scaleable" designation).

Real-time data capture is handled by eleven Symbol VRC7946 fork truck-mounted terminals and three Symbol PDT6846 handheld units. These have a VT200 emulation mode to allow direct links to the Opus logistics centre.

Communications between Opus and the remote terminals are managed by a Symbol S24 high-rate wireless LAN (a version of 802.11b spread-spectrum technology).

Microlise is a leading reseller for Symbol Technologies, and unlike most other software suppliers has its own engineering division, which in fact builds some products for Symbol. This year it also announced a vehicle tracking system, Opus Fleet, using the company's own "black box" to monitor vehicle functions.