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LEEDS, England, September 26 -- British Airways Regional Cargo is using a sophisticated web based vehicle tracking service to record the minute by minute movement of air cargo. The Masternaut service provides transport managers at BA Regional Cargo (BARC) with real time access, via the Internet, to detailed, vehicle specific information. This has enhanced customer service, improved vehicle and driver management and is expected to enable increased capacity.

The Masternaut service uses satellite technology and high speed mobile communications to establish and transmit the exact location of each vehicle. The vehicle movements are logged by Masternaut and can be accessed by any web enabled PC or device. Microsoft MapPoint online street mapping provides real world context and navigational intelligence to the vehicle positions.

In addition customer specific locations can be added to the Masternaut system, for example security points or airside collection depots, enabling monitoring of vehicle movements at predetermined positions. As part of the contract with British Airways, BARC have an engagement policy; the estimated or guideline time a vehicle should be on site. As Masternaut accurately records vehicle based events BARC are able to produce detailed client reports including onsite waiting times and airside vehicle movements.

"Masternaut enables us to accurately record where our vehicles are and for how long." Said Russ Williams, Operations Manager for BARC at Heathrow. "We can 'see' every vehicle without leaving the office. We know when they arrive onsite, when they leave a site and where they go in between." Williams continued, "In addition to the client reports we produce using Masternaut we also use the information collected by the system to produce driver based statistics. Before we implemented the Masternaut solution it would take us approximately one week every month to collate information from paper logs in order to meet our obligations under the Working Time Directive. Now all we have to do is enter ad hoc information, such as driver holidays or sickness, and Masternaut does the rest."

BARC provides general cargo handling for all British Airways flights to and from the UK regions and Ireland as well as for other major airline customers. Transport operations are managed from a central distribution centre close to Heathrow airport and the delivery vehicles are operational twenty four hours a day seven days a week. The fleet will on average complete five hundred movements a month servicing Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted airports.

Masternaut

CONTACTS: MASTERNAUT: Martin Port, Managing Director of Masternaut, tel +44-(0)113-281-4000, masternaut.co.uk : mobile resource management.
PR CONTACT: Robert Peel, for more information and photograph, tel: +44-(0)1666-823306