Projects

Acumentive has more than 15 years experience of Cable Tracking and Management solutions, developed through the delivery of projects to organisations including Morrison Telecom Services, British Telecom and Openreach.

Morrison Telecom Services.

Morrison Telecom Services is a part of M Group Services, delivering a range of essential infrastructure services to the water, energy (infrastructure and retail), transport and telecom sectors across the UK and Ireland. Morrison Telecom Services is focused on the design, build and maintenance of telecom infrastructure for key clients in the fixed telecom market. Working collaboratively with clients, Morrison Telecom Services brings commitment, innovation, teamwork and accountability to deliver long-term partnerships.

The requirement for this project has been brought about by changes in the way our key customer requires their inventory to be managed. Morrison Telecom Services provide a range of network build and maintenance services for our customer and therefore operate a network of 40+ strategic stores which hold our customer-owned inventory. Our customer needed to have greater control, visibility and governance of inventory that they provided to their suppliers.

Acumentive was approached to assist in delivering a cable and stock control system with much greater stock fidelity and financial control. The task was to develop a tailored stock control system for all of Morrison Telecom Services logistical needs in close collaboration with our team.

Moving from a redundant stock control system to the Asset Tracking system required real understanding of our business model from Acumentive, with extensive scoping work to be carried out. Acumentive provided an end to end service, engaging with our end users, our national Logistics organisation all the way through to our customer’s technical team. With every step in this vital piece of work, Acumentive kept us informed, updated and on course to ensure a successful planned system roll out. The development of the critical requirements, the manner in which our roll-over was implemented and the attention to detail of Acumentive resulted in a seamless transition.

The success of go-live coincided with first class technical support, with weekly software releases in the test system and a 24 hour help desk. With a project of this scale, contingency was key, and several trial runs and hand-shake tests were undertaken, to not only ensure the system was robust before go-live approval, but also that we had a tangible fall back plan.

Go-live was a complete success with the system operational from day one, a testament to Acumentive’s investment in the customer and listening to our system needs from day one up until sign off the project. In August 2020, the Asset Tracking solution went live, with over 40 stores UK-wide migrated over to our new operating system. All our systems requirements were met, and with the support of Acumentive, we were able to document standard operating procedures for all our stores to use. We are able to provide real time data to our customer, and have significantly improved visibility of our materials usage, inventory holding and incoming replenishment orders. We look forward to pushing our new system further to implement more inventory control improvements.

Openreach.

Innovative track and trace solution protects high-value assets and streamlines operations.

When most people think about innovation it brings to mind the latest bright and shiny electronic gadgets. Yet away from the business to consumer market are truly innovative ideas that make businesses and processes perform better. We all benefit from this ingenuity, but few can imagine what’s going on behind the scenes. BT Asset Trace helps Openreach track millions of pounds-worth of vital telecoms apparatus – from humble home hubs to massive drums of copper cable and the superfast broadband cabinets that connect nearly all businesses and homes in the UK. Customers get superior service. Openreach gets a better bottom line. And the environment’s protected too.

Openreach turned to BT. In turn, Acumentive, a UK organisation who specialise in real-time asset location and management, was asked to assist.

BT worked with Acumentive to customise and embed the organisation’s SenseAnyWare® application into the BT Asset Trace platform for a number of soolutions including Cable. BT Asset Trace for Cable.

Every year Openreach purchases countless miles of expensive fibre and copper cable to extend or repair the country’s telecommunications networks. Those assets are stored on drums in service centres across the country. For years they were tracked manually. But traditional methods met many challenges. For example, the quantity of cable used on specific jobs couldn’t be tracked. Exact national stock locations and quantities weren’t known. If a section of cable was cut from a drum, the remaining length couldn’t be assigned a new value. This meant some cable leftovers were never used because stock insights didn’t exist. Now with BT Asset Trace for Cable, Openreach tracks and audits millions of pounds-worth of cable in use by its contractors.

BT Supply Chain Partners.

BT Supply Chain Partners provides logistics and supply chain services to more than 30,000 BT engineers across the UK, including the management of engineering spares and cable stocks held at more than 150 BT sites and cable compounds across the United Kingdom. Cable stock within BT consists of both special cable ordered for specific jobs and commonly used cable (Kanban) stored in outside compounds. Around 80% of cable is copper core, with a single large drum being worth many thousands. In storage, cable is at a high risk of theft, particularly from compounds which are unmanned.

Whilst many of the engineering components and consumables at technical equipment centres have been managed with up to 400 cable drums in a single yard at any one time, the challenge set was to provide an effective system to manage and optimise the issue and return process, providing accurate stock visibility in the local yard and across all yards to manage stock, enable greater reuse and to link this into security. This had to be achieved without imposing additional administration onto customer focussed engineers.

The BT supply chain team turned to Acumentive to come up with a workable solution. Acumentive designed a solution using Wavetrend Active RFID tags to automatically identify each cable drum to a Site, and using a central asset and stock management system to record cable stocks and related transactions. Active RFID tags were used to automatically identify movements in and out of compounds to prompt storesman to complete transactions all with detailed timestamps and to provide continuous audit. Radio Data Terminals (RDTs) were used by to record receipts, issues and returns—capturing information such as cable length—and used for ‘walk-by’ auditing and drum location.

The solution was first delivered in trial form at the Croydon Technical Equipment Centre and then deployed to the 21st Century Network demo site at Cardiff, then rolled out to 5 further UK sites to evaluate cost/benefit of RFID use. The solution enabled the compound managers to increase re-use of cable, improve service to engineers and reduce non-returned drums. Linked with the Supply Chain item tracking system in use at BT, the solution provides full traceability of Cable in delivery to compounds through the BT network and into use.