Focused growth during a recession

During the recession we hear many tales of woe from the UK manufacturing sector, so it is good to hear of a UK company who is bucking the trend with solid, focussed growth. LGE meets Wisbech, Cambridgeshire-based Burall InfoSmart Ltd

When LGE last featured Burall InfoSmart, in 2006, they were part of the Burall group and we reviewed their Burall InfoCare system which won awards for its clever use of smartcard and telecoms technologies to revolutionise the management of adult social services. Things have changed in Burall InfoSmart camp, but the focus on innovation and customer service has proved to be a successful mix.

Independence

Rod Duddin, managing director and now sole-owner, explains: “The Burall group’s proud history was tarnished as it became a victim of over-capacity in its core markets of printing and packaging. However, Burall InfoSmart, with our focus on public-sector systems, had been the most successful company in the Burall group for some years and the break-up of the group gave us the opportunity to follow our own fortunes.

“We are now in the happy position to have fully paid-off the pension deficit inherited from the group and to have bought out the former group’s shares three years ahead of schedule. Throughout the difficult transition, production and sales continued and we never lost a single customer or supplier, due to the hard work and loyalty of all our staff and partners, both professional and personal.”

Focus on Core Markets

Burall InfoSmart has kept its public sector focus. It has also stuck to its core business of personalised smartcards and tickets plus the development of specialist RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags and bespoke information systems.

Magnetic Tickets

Its traditional magnetic-ticket market has held up strongly in the recession. The cold winter and higher fuel prices greatly increased demand for prepayment cards in the utility sector and the magnetic ticket market has long-outlasted its forecast demise where many systems were expected to switch to smart cards. For example, London Underground, as was, was one of its original customers and to this day, Burall still provides all the personalised Public Transport Access Cards for all staff at its successor, Transport for London.

Transport & ITSO

Transport is, in fact, a major sector for Burall. It makes staff passes for all ATOC train operators whose services terminate in London and also makes the monthly rail cards for various other train operators. Furthermore, as founder members of ITSO, the members’ organisation responsible for developing interoperable smart ticketing systems in the UK, Burall is at the forefront of the technology and sits on the ITSO Supplier’s Special Interest Group. This puts them in a position to influence the technology and ITSO specifications and to be in the best position to advise their transport customers on appropriate technologies and implementation.Image

It is interesting to see how Burall InfoSmart used this specialist ITSO expertise to help meet the big launch of the English National Concessionary Travel Scheme, ENCTS, in 2008. Faced with the scenario of a hard deadline of the launch date of April 1st, and the expected delays in getting the personal data required of all those entitled to concessionary travel, Burall developed a novel solution to enable a very rapid encoding to the ENCTS standard. It partnered with an organisation who had no smartcard encoding experience but who had excellent digital printing capability for making contactless smartcards in high volume. Burall developed and installed its ‘black-box’ encoding system for ENCTS cards which is capable of encoding fully- certified personalised ENCTS travel passes at a rate equivalent to hundreds of conventional desk-top printer-encoders. This is remotely supported and is currently certified to the latest published ITSO v2.1.3 standard. Importantly, it also gives Burall a revenue stream from smartcards made by others, allowing growth without increasing overhead costs, which is very important in these recessionary times.

Schools & Universities

The other traditional markets of schools and universities have shown particularly good growth as more and more universities embrace the benefits of using smartcards for student services such as libraries, access control, canteen & retail partners, print & copy-control systems and other niche applications such as locker-access and voting systems. Typically, the cards are personalised for staff and students but no two universities operate the same enrolment processes. Some require Burall to send out part-completed personalised application forms (with course-specific flyers) in advance of starting whilst others have fully on-line enrolment and ask Burall to do the ‘big-bang’ of new student cards each autumn.

New rules from the UK Borders Agency have mandated universities to record ‘attendance’ of all foreign students at various “expected events”, such as lectures and tutorials, and this has raised new interest in recording the activities of all students. There is excellent research to show strong correlation between attendance and retention of students, important to both the students and the universities so, recognising this, Burall InfoSmart are sponsoring an event called “Retention in Tough Times” which is being hosted by Southampton Solent University on the 8th & 9th of September 2009. (Details can be found at the Higher-Education Smart Card association website, www.hesca.com)

Citizen Cards

After several years of trials, a ‘National Project’ and various pilots, this year, the concept of Citizen Cards in England took a leap forward with the launch of the Hillingdon First card for the London Borough of Hillingdon. Unlike most previous attempts at introducing Citizen Cards in England, where residents request or subscribe to cards, Hillingdon took the brave step of issuing cards to all residents by right; a ‘push’ delivery as opposed to a ‘pull’ delivery. The card is used to give preferential parking rates for residents and to give free access to the precious resource of waste recycling centres and civic amenity sites. Non-residents pay a slightly higher parking rate and need to pay Hillingdon £10 to access Hillingdon’s waste sites if they don’t want to use the sites provided by their own council. Importantly, the card also gives residents discounts at over 400 local retailers who have signed-up to the scheme.

Burall InfoSmart won the contract to produce some 250,000 personalised cards, the biggest Citizen Card scheme in England, and the ‘push’ delivery gave the unusual characteristic that some 150,000 cards all had to be delivered within a specific week in June this year.

This coincided with a switch-over of the library system from old bar-coded cards to the new Hillingdon First cards. Apart from the secure printing and encoding of all the cards, Burall produced the personalised letters, put them in envelopes with a Hillingdon First leaflet and stored them strictly in a sequence. This was to ensure that the letters for residents who had died or who had moved away since the data was collected could be found and ‘pulled’ at the last moment before Royal Mail loaded their trucks to deliver the huge consignment. The highly successful launch was celebrated at Burall InfoSmart’s HQ by several of the key suppliers to the project. (Further information on Hillingdon First may be found at http://www.hillingdon.gov.uk/ index.jsp?articleid=15421) Systems.

It is not all about cards at Burall InfoSmart and the company continue to work on systems and special projects for major customers. New developments in NFC, Near Field Communications, where new mobile phones can be used to simulate contactless smartcards and to become portable smartcard readers which are connected via the mobile network, are being kept under wraps but some of the other system solutions have matured in major schemes.

The award-winning Burall InfoCare system which measures the quality of delivered homecare for adult social service
departments has now been sold to one Burall’s partners and key terminal supplier, Nexus Machines Ltd. Burall still hold
key contracts in this area but they are gradually being novated to Nexus with Burall’s continued support.

The computerised MOT system continues as a major success. Lauded as probably the most successful national IT project ever, the system has affected everyone who can now get their tax disk on-line or allow the police to check on a vehicle’s MOT status before even stopping it. Burall InfoSmart developed and delivered 40,000 custom rugged terminals for the project and uses a secure link to the VOSA database to enable the daily despatch of secure smartcards for all certified vehicle examiners. Siemens IT and Solutions, the PFI contract holders, have been delighted with Burall’s support and it is expected that the contract will continue to 2015 and beyond.

Expansion

Further, evidence of “following its own fortunes” is obvious as we visit Burall’s HQ with two adjacent industrial units and its near by brand new factory which has been fitted out to its specification. Lawrence Faulkner, director, said “Instead of leasing part of the Burall Group premises from the group, we now have a set of facilities which are just right for us. These buildings were formerly run by Fenland District Council which has been very supportive of us and
the Burall group over the years and we were lucky to find local premises which are convenient for our loyal staff.”

They take me to the nearby new factory which is light and airy and big enough to house their vast magneticink coating machine and one of their magnetic card printing presses. Faulkner explains: “Although our power needs are fairly modest and we strictly monitor our emissions, waste and power consumption, there are many demands on power on this site and so we have paid for a separate power transformer to give us security of supply. The new site has been funded out of products which we would otherwise had dropped if we could not have found the space. As always, we have never taken on any long-term debt to finance our expansion, which is very sensible when we know how difficult it is for some companies to borrow money at the moment.”

Digital Print

There is no hiding it however, that the pride and joy of the new factory is the new Digital Print line for masspersonalisation of smart cards. Trevor Reeve, production manager, beams when he explains what it means for Burall and its customers. Standing in the middle of the clean-room facility within the factory, Reeve said: “Instead of printing smart cards on traditional slow desk-top machines using 300dpi [dots per inch], this machine enables us to print 21-up cards, superfast, at 2,400dpi. We can make dumb cards [printed plastic cards] or contactless smartcards on this system and we have full control of the materials, thicknesses , lamination and punching.”

It took a while to sink in but the innovation is profound. Traditionally, contactless smartcards are made up in sheets of outer layers of PVC laminated over chips and aerials (the electronic bits of the card, called an ‘inlay’) before punching them out to form ‘blank white singles’ and then over-printing each card individually to personalise it. The personalisation is slow and usually uses expensive colour ribbons. Digital Print however is like an industrial colour printer driven by a database which mixes the fixed and variable information to produce personalised printed colour sheets of 21 card designs. The smart cards are made up of a sandwich of these sheets, one on the back and one on the front, with the inlay in between them and the whole thing protected by clear plastic ‘overlays’. It sounds complicated but it means that the whole slow and expensive personalisation step is avoided and replaced with a low cost digital print process. The cards are printed at much higher resolution, the print is under the surface, protected by the overlays, and they are lower cost!

Several customers are now taking advantage of the new system at Buralls but it is clear that, by continuing to invest in appropriate technologies and skills, Burall InfoSmart are succeeding where others are faltering and we wait to see how they will fare over the next three years.

For further information, contact Lawrence Faulkner, Director info@burall-infosmart.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it telephone: 0845 257 8001 www.burall-infosmart.com