Sandpiper helps Abingdon and Alliance Flooring improve stock visibility with "FocusID" Mobile Computing Solution

Abingdon Flooring started trading on 31st October 2003 as a result of the management buyout of Carpets International following its fall into receivership. Four of the Carpets International Directors put together a rescue package and purchased the manufacturing plant at Crumlin near Newbridge, South Wales. The workforce was secured and expansion plans included an increase in workforce headcount and an extension to the existing warehouse.

Renamed Abingdon Flooring Ltd, the site has been in operation for over 20 years and formerly employed a quarter of the workforce of Carpets International. The company manufactures both the yarn for the carpets as well as the carpets themselves and the well known brand names of Kosset, Abingdon, StainFree and Wilton Royal are in the impressive portfolio.

As part of the acquisition the company's IBM AS/400 based computer system including the warehouse management functionality and handheld scanners was adopted at the Crumlin site. The handheld computers and wireless infrastructure used 'Narrow Band' radio technology, and suffered from poor reliability and battery life.

Alliance Flooring Distribution in Kidderminster was subsequently acquired in April 2005 taking the combined stock capacity of both companies' to nearly a million square meters of carpet.

As the Alliance Flooring warehouse operation was purely paper based, it was considered that it would make sense to implement new barcode scanning and wireless mobile computers at this site first. An approach was made to Sandpiper Corporation to recommend a real time rugged mobile computing solution to meet the needs of both the Alliance and Abingdon warehouses.