up, up and away
Who are they?
The Air Support Unit (ASU) of the Metropolitan Police is now part of Central Operations. Based at Lippitts Hill in Loughton they have been providing cover to the London area for almost 25 years.
What they wanted
They had a Civil Aviation Authority approved bespoke application which they used to monitor aircraft service schedules and parts replacements which was written in FoxPro. It offered them multi-faceted functionality covering items such as stock control, suppliers, service schedules, replacement part schedules, flying times and mileage monitoring.
The unit recently acquired three Eurocopter EC145 helicopters to offer 24/7 cover to the metropolitan area. As part of this change they decided they would also migrate the system and its functionality into their central SAP system.
How we did it
The developers who were implementing this functionality had a need to import the information from the existing system into the new one being developed. Without an in-depth knowledge of FoxPro they were struggling to do this in a timely or cost-effective manner.
We sent Hugh down to Lippitts Hill (they wouldn't pick us up in one of their 'choppers) to investigate. He spent a couple of weeks working closely with the developers, getting to grips with the current data structures. He then wrote a set of export routines to extract out the data and adapt it ready to be imported into the new systems.
Project highlights
The speed at which Hugh was able to correct the data and prepare it for import helped bring the project back on schedule.