Irish parcels carrier Nightline is to spend €200,000 on IT hardware to further improve its abilityto handle a growing volume of business.
Most of the expenditure will be taken up by new and more powerful servers at the company’sDublin headquarters and sophisticated hand-held terminals for drivers. The upgrade involves theinstallation of high-powered HP servers and equipping the firm’s drivers with Motorola handheldterminals.
Nightline CEO John Tuohy said the programme underlined the central role which the firm’sbespoke IT system, known as Smartship, had in its plans for continued growth. “We introducedSmartship a decade ago because we recognised the importance in being able to efficiently manageincreasing business. In that time, we’ve gone from handling 1,000 transactions each week to around130,000 transactions per day, so we need IT which can cope not just with our current levels butwith still greater volumes.
“Smartship is at the heart of every aspect of our operations, from collections, warehousemanagement and deliveries to accounts. It underpins our ability to deliver on our promises toclients and, therefore, it makes sense to ensure it remains as robust as possible.
“Over the course of the last decade, we have spent more than €6 million on creating andrefining our IT infrastructure for the benefit of our clients and the company. We believe thislatest investment will enable us to not only live up to but exceed the standards which we have setourselves so far.”
Tuohy said that work was being conducted well in advance of the peak Christmas deliveryseason in order to make sure that Nightline was even more capable of processing the expectedincrease in parcel volumes. The new equipment will be up and running before the end of this monthwith IT staff working across weekends to ensure that client service is not affected in any way.
