Augustus Martin is the largest prepress printer in Europe including Screen Process, Lithographic and Digital Print. It provides printing services and complete outsourcing facilities for many major organizations including LloydsTSB.

Aldex had already developed a Campaign Management system for LloydsTSB. Data from this first system is then sent to LloydsTSB's printers, Augustus Martin, for further processing. Augustus Martin's system, which we developed for them a couple of years earlier, reads the campaign data, matches it up with the actual branch information, and generates an average of 5,000 individual address labels per week. These labels are then attached to packages of posters/leaflets and are sent out from Augustus Martin's site via a dedicated TNT logistics service called Carousel. What was now required was a means of tracking all of these packages at three main points in their journey. Firstly when they are placed on pallets ready for collection by the carrier, secondly when they pass through TNT's main collection hub and finally when they are scanned by the driver on delivery to the branch. Data from all three stages had to be collated and synchronized back into the main database so that the location of each package is accurately known.

As each day's collection could consist of several thousand individual items the details of each package needed to be sent electronically to the carrier to prevent the time consuming process of recording these individually during collection. For the same reason the carrier did not want to stick their own bar-code labels onto each package during collection. The system therefore had to comply with TNT's existing bar-code infrastructure which not only defined the specific bar-code that was used (a variant of EAN-128) but also it's exact composition, height, width, placing, etc. These latter requirements were critical because the central hub scan consists of a high speed conveyor belt with angled lasers scanning the bar codes automatically as the packages zoom through; hence the precise design of the labels/bar codes was essential in getting good scanning rates.

Aldex was asked to enhance the existing system to meet these new requirements.