Manchester Ship Canal, Runcorn, Cheshire

Runcorn Docks is part of the Manchester Ship Canal Company. The docks are used to unload ships containing a variety of products from glass and pottery to raw materials in bulk for the fertiliser industry.

Ships are unloaded into stock or onto lorries for transport direct to customers. A weighbridge determines the quantity of material from vehicle weights.

P&L were asked to deliver a stock control solution that managed stock movements both to and from vessels and customers in a multi-user system. A specific requirement was an interface to the weighbridge control panel to extract weight and time information to conform to Weights and Measures legislation.

The software was originally developed using Clipper, an xBase compiler, on a Novell Netware LAN in 1991. In 2001 the site updated to Windows 2000 Server with P&L rewriting the Clipper software in Visual Basic.