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The English National
Concessionary Travel Scheme, ENCTS, is the biggest roll-out
of public-sector smartcards this year. The smartcards
are based on the ITSO standard and enable disabled
passengers and those over 60 to receive free off-peak
travel, anywhere in England.
To help meet this need, Burall InfoSmart,
as founder members of ITSO and experts in concessionary
travel, partnered with Payne Security to help exploit their
high-capacity Digital Print card-assembly process.
Apart from training Payne's sales staff and visiting dozens
of Transport Concession Authorities (TCA's) with them,
Burall developed a novel very high speed automatic encoding
system at Payne's facility in Mold, Flintshire, which can
simultaneously encode multiple cards to the required ITSO
standard. Burall commissioned the system and got it
certified by ITSO and validated via ITSO Services Ltd on
behalf of Payne as well as advising them on data and
security management issues to successfully encode ITSO
customer media (smartcards).
As a result, Payne Security were able to
win dozens of new customers for the prestigious ENCTS
project and produce some 300,000 fully personalised
smartcards in time for the deadline of 31st March 2008.
The technical details of the encoding
system are confidential but the ITSO certified encoding
system is owned by Burall InfoSmart and licenced on a
per-card basis. The system is the fastest ITSO
encoding system in the UK and achieves a throughput
equivalent to hundreds of desk-top printer-encoders.
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