Marcroft Engineering offer a leading edge operation servicing and maintaining privately owned freight rolling stock for the rail industry.

Since their early days as both ‘Wagon Repairs’ and ‘Rail Car Services,” Marcroft have under gone much innovative change and now offer a complete rail management package.

The company have a £20m turnover and are a wholly owned subsidiary of Brambles - the Australian conglomerate.

Tom Jones the current IT Manager at Marcroft comes from a strong IT background. He has been chief programmer within a range of industries and was the Development Manager at the then “Rail Car” until he came to his current position of IT Manager with Marcroft.

A decision was taken by the board in 1996 to replace their ageing PICK system and CCL were enlisted to produce a requirements list and manage the project.

This was undertaken over a twelve month period and some 20 potential suppliers were contacted.

A thorough investigation of all suppliers was undertaken and a short list of companies was drawn up, with the aim of moving away from a Bespoke System to a Package System.

Open Logistix Systems were selected to be the prime contractor for all the hardware, software and the networking for the whole of the UK.

Open Logistix Systems are the author of OpenLogistix, a fully modular supply chain solution, managing all types of inbound / outbound logistic and value added operations.

The products (Open Logistix, OpenAccounts and Open Pay) are all ‘best of breed’, using leading relational database technology and are fully integrated with Microsoft products.

“Open Logistix system was not the cheapest, but what it did allow us to do was to reduce our numbers in IT and make users more responsible for their data. “

The major factor in Open Logistix Systems winning this contract was the enthusiasm and eagerness shown by Open Logistix key personnel in understanding Marcrofts very specific Fleet Management requirements.

The first of these two stages was in April of 1997 to install OpenAccounts. The project was managed and conducted to both cost and schedule. Tom Jones said of the Project Management:

“ Our meetings with the Open Logistix staff were excellent, their staff were enthusiastic and the project management was first class.”

The second stage, in February of 1998, was to install Open Logistix, with a 90% fit

This £750,000 order was implemented exactly to budget, a classic project with Open Logistix Systems acting as Prime.