Fenland Laundry managing director Simon Fry is joining forces with software engineer Jim Liley to form Pro-Track computer systems.
Mr Fry, who will continue in his role at Fenland, will be Pro-Track’s chairman and Mr Liley, formerly responsible for software development at Saracen Laundry, will be its managing director.
Mr Fry stressed that Pro-Track will be a completely separate operation from Fenland Laundry, although Fenland will be the new company’s first test site.
Software should be ready for trial by February 1999 and Pro-Track hopes to have a product in the marketplace by the Summer of the same year.
Mr Fry said he had long felt there was a gap in the market for software that is precisely geared to the textile care industry. “Pro-Track brings together software expertise and experience of the workwear rental business and should be able to fill that gap,” he explained.
Mr Liley added: “We will be using the very latest software development systems to deliver a more powerful, reliable and flexible system than those currently available.
“Our systems will be able to capture and process large volumes of data in real time—an essential requirement for any fast-moving industry and for laundry tracking applications.
“Managers will be able to use modern desktop systems such as Windows 95 and NT to extract information from the database interactively and intuitively and in a way that will suit their specific requirements. This will allow better management control of the process and in turn, lead to better customer response.”
