Teesside logistics firm increases its comfort level IT\\\


Middlesbrough-headquartered multimodal logistics specialist AV Dawson decided last year to invest significantly in new IT. The company, which as well as offering road, rail and sea distribution is also the largest dry cargo wharf operator on the River Tees, spent £67,500 on IT systems to meet the needs of a growing customer list. According to office manager,


Neil McShane: “I think it’s reasonable to say that our legacy systems were close to breaking point, with compromised backup routines and disk space at a critical level. We certainly couldn’t afford to risk catastrophic system failure and the potential for extended downtime that would cause.”


The solution came from


Newcastle-based TSG, which was already providing IT support for AV Dawson. Its system, described as “fully virtualised” and thus ideal for AV Dawson’s multi-site business, is also expected to provide a built-in disaster recovery capability. AV Dawson’s technical


director, Paul Burns, explains: “Compatibility issues relating to a number of existing applications dictated the need for an on- premise solution. It was clear that the business wasn’t ready for migration to the Cloud. By deploying two Windows 2012 Hyper-V Hosts in the Ayrton Office to provide full replication and a


CEVA leads the no-paper chase


Freight forwarder CEVA Logistics says it has reached 20.4% e-AWB penetration


across its global


business, making it one of the leaders in paperless airfreight. In September 2014, CEVA also achieved the fastest e-AWB growth of any logistics company. CEVA


signed the multilateral agreement IATA for the


use of electronic Air Waybills in summer 2013. This laid the legal ground, by replacing the terms and conditions printed on the paper AWB. It then focused on making systems e-AWB


its operational


capable, so that electronic AWB messages to carriers were fully reflective of what had previously been printed on the paper AWB. CEVA is now rolling out e-AWB globally, with those carriers which


support it, following a successful initial pilot in New York, Atlanta, London and Frankfurt. CEVA vice president, global


air operations and compliance, Peter Baumgartner adds that with many stations yet to cut-over to full eAWB usage before the end of the year, CEVA is well on target to meet the IATA target of 22% e-AWB by the end of 2014. He said: “eAWB is a first step to


efreight – a paperless airfreight environment which will enhance efficiency, accuracy and speed of processing and at the same time reduce our environmental impact through considerably less use of paper. We are fully behind the drive towards the electronic exchange of data and messages and we will continue to lead the way during 2015,” he adds.


Beer flows freely, thanks to e-Customs


Scottish brewer Islay Ales has taken advantage of e-customs’ free service to help low to medium volume exporters tackle UK Customs requirements. Steve Bavin, Director, Islay Ales said the small brewery was looking to


export its beers outside the EU, and needed a system that could meet the Excise Movement Control System (EMCS) requirements with a minimum of fuss and effort whilst also providing us with some business benefits. “We found just what we needed with Webdecs.” This free service from e-customs is an alternative to the free service


currently available from the Government Gateway. It offers extra features - for instance there is no need to re-key standing data and there is ready access to past declaration details. Managing director of e-customs, Alun Davies, added: “All low volume


exporters really must explore what we are making freely available and compare it to the service provided by the Government because this is an opportunity to easily upgrade and improve their procedures to current best practice at no cost.”


further host on the Wharf site, we put in place complete ‘failover’ (the ability to switch to a redundant or standby computer server) and high availability. It means the business can continue to operate seamlessly even if one of the sites fails.”


Managing director Gary


Dawson adds: “This investment helps put AV Dawson in a position to become the go-to logistics firm


for anything related to offshore support and wind energy. Our customers working within the offshore energy sector will only increase as we continue to move towards a 24-hour quayside operation.” From initial scoping of the project to ‘go live’


took just six


months. According to Dawson: “We now have the ability to turn on new virtual servers in a very


short lead time. An


example just recently was a FTP server – this was specified and set up and working live within a week. “We didn’t have to


purchase hardware or soſtware; it was merely “switched on and configured – one day’s work,” he enthuses.


Issue 1 2015 - Freight Business Journal


17


Gary Dawson of AV Dawson says it only took six months to get the complete system up and running


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