A British Airways plane is sitting at the gate at Heathrow, engines running and passengers strapped in. Suddenly a key component fails. Passengers are taken off the plane and arrangements are made to get them to New York on another flight. Meanwhile, your disabled plane is parked on the tarmac, costing you £200 a minute in lost revenue. Now, what do you do about getting a replacement part?

In such a situation, time is critical. A spare must be delivered to the stranded plane without delay. This is where BAX Global come to the rescue.

BAX Global is a £1.5 billion global transportation and supply chain management company offering multi-modal freight forwarding capability to business-to-business shippers worldwide. Headquartered in California, they operate over 500 offices in 123 countries around the world, employing over 10,000 people. The UK based arm of BAX Global is at Heathrow and its forte is manning the supply chain for the world's leading aerospace companies including Boeing, Airbus Industrie, General Motors, British Airways and Air France to name just a few.

And it is at Heathrow that BAX Global have brought in bar code and data collection specialist ExPD. With the huge costs associated with delays in the aerospace industry, it is imperative that BAX Global offer a swift and accurate response to their customers. Responsible for spares storage, they needed a high speed data collection and user picking operation to keep to help them meet spare part requests - from nuts and bolts through to spare tyres.

Collaborating together to specify the requirements, ExPD developed a bespoke end-to-end logistics system covering warehouse radio data collection, thermal transfer tag printing and a proof of delivery system. A range of hardware was selected, including 40 Dolphin hand held terminals, truck mounted computers, truck mounted and portable printers and wedge scanners. ExPD also assisted in the creation of the application program using Hand Held Products unique Visual Basic add-on software development tool, RF Simplicity.

Mark Sarl of BAX Global said, "we elected to use the Dolphin RF system because of the product design and ruggedness. ExPD as a trusted supplier assured BAX of excellent product performance, and to date the system is proving a great success".