Problem:     A major supplier of transit vehicles had a control system based on a proprietary 2.4GHz radio communications system. The vendor supplying the radio system later dropped that line of business. The vehicle builder needed another supplier to take over engineering and manufacturing responsibility for the system. The advanced technology used in the system as well as the strict reliability requirements meant that the vendor needed to be technically very competent, have exacting reliability standards, and offer superior customer service since these systems are used throughout the world. The vehicle builder also needed to have the vendor brought on very quickly since the contract with the previous supplier was rapidly coming to an end.

Solution:     Group Alpha worked with the previous vendor and the transit vehicle supplier to obtain as much of the existing documentation that was available. Since the previous supplier had dropped this line of business some time ago, all of the engineering staff that had been associated with the radio system had gone. Group Alpha as able to take the existing, sometimes incomplete, engineering documentation, convert it to our format and completely rebuild the software and all of the programmable parts. We then built a set of qualification prototypes using this new documentation package.

The new prototypes underwent the same exacting qualifications testing that the original equipment had to undergo. All units passed flawlessly and were accepted by the customer without modification.

The project was originally quoted to take nine months to complete and we finished it in less than eight. Group Alpha now has the contract for on-going engineering support and maintenance for the installed systems as well as providing subsequent radio devices for this design.