Historically, color label printing has been either too cost prohibitive to do oneself or the quality was lacking to make it worth doing. With the Epson ColorWorks TM-C3500 both of these challenges are resolved.

With the ColorWorks C3500, you can easily customise and print your own colour labels. Whether it’s printing packaging labels with colourful logos and pictures or tickets and ID cards with important barcodes and product information, this printer ensures you can print it all from one machine. It also helps you conform with GHS international chemical labelling guidelines, as labels can be printed on-demand without using pre-printed templates.

When you hear the term verification in regards to printing barcodes we are referring to much more than just making a readable barcode. Verification is a much more specific requirement for the quality of a 1D barcode or 2D symbol according to an agreed-upon quality standard. Not meeting these standards with your customers, be it Walmart or the DoD, will end up costing you in fines and time lost.

Lucky for all of us we have manufactures like Microscan who make verification easy so you can catch the barcodes that don’t meet the mark before they ever leave your facility. There are essentially 3 main things that can go wrong when printing a barcode that will lead to failing verification.

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Presentation mode gives customers the ability to scan barcodes without having to squeeze any triggers.  You “present” the barcode to the scanner and it scans.  Presentation mode uses ambient light and scanner illumination to detect barcodes.

There are two types of Presentation Modes:

1. Presentation Mode.  In this mode the scanner’s LEDs remain dim until a bar code is presented to the scanner.  When a barcode is presented & detected the LEDs turn up, the aimer turns on, and the scanner scans the bar code.   This mode tends to do a better job with bad barcodes.
2. Streaming Presentation Mode:  The scanner’s LEDs remain fully on and the scanner is always scanning.  When a barcode is presented the aimer turns on and the barcode is “scanned”.  This mode tends to scan good barcodes faster.  In Streaming Presentation Mode there is even a Normal flavor and an Enhanced flavor.
   • Normal = Good scan speed and the longest working ranges.
   • Enhanced = Fastest scan speed but less range.

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More than any other hospital staff member, nurses have felt the greatest impact to their workflow in support of Meaningful Use requirements and modern healthcare best practices. Ever-increasing government regulations for improved clinical documentation, in combination with a constant flow of new medical devices, have nurses spending more than 30% of their time in non-patient-care activities. Compound this with hospitals being squeezed financially from new government reimbursement laws, and the new reality is that nursing staffs are being reduced while simultaneously being asked to deliver more effective care. This demand for greater nursing efficiency and effectiveness has led to the creation of today’s modern Connected Clinician.

So what exactly is the Connected Clinician and what is enabling him or her to be more effective and efficient than ever before? The answer rests in new clinical mobile applications running on true Clinical Smartphones. Every leading Electronic Medical Records (EMR) software provider and specialty clinical software company is racing to release new mobile versions of their proven workflow applications to support the growing demand for greater mobility within the hospital. Applications such as vitals collection, meds administration, specimen collection, alarm management, nurse call and most importantly, care team communication are in the greatest demand. Reference apps that provide nurses and other clinical staff easy access to electronic drug data and dose safety information, such as eBroselow SafeDose, or medical dictionaries and disease reference guides, are very common as well.
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Empowering your mobile workforce has become a primary concern for almost every business today. From the warehouse and delivery destinations to the retail sales floor and patient bedside, having access to critical information on a mobile device that is easy to use and can handle the rigors of daily use is key to a capable, efficient workforce.

Many businesses are looking to the familiar Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod) as viable solutions due to their familiar interface that their employees are often already familiar with. Utilizing these devices mean less time training and easier integration into the company’s workflow. The biggest hurdle with the Apple products in enterprise applications is the lack of durability and capable barcode scanner or magnetic stripe reader. This is where Honeywell’s Captuvo line can take your Apple device from a standard consumer device to an enterprise-grade mobile computer.

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WebLink is the world’s first barcode setup program that is used entirely in a web browser. Access reader controls on your most common devices and use your favorite browser as your workspace. No software to install, no compatibility obstacles, no experience needed. Without manuals, without software, without any special barcode reading expertise, WebLink empowers any user to simply read barcodes. Decoding has never been easier with MicroHAWK (ID-20, ID-30, ID-40) Series and WebLink: the incredibly intuitive way to read barcodes.

Medsen Apotheken owns a chain of 42 pharmacies in the Netherlands with over 550 employees.  The company’s philosophy is to always put the customers’ health first.  This means that pharmacists should be dedicating as much time as needed to each customer.  Medsen Apotheken relies on innovation and implements technology to fulfill this goal.

The Challenge

One of the issues that pharmacies face is prescription delivery times.  Anyone who goes to a pharmacy is familiar with the problem: the medication hasn’t arrived, or isn’t ready when the customer comes to collect it.  “We regularly had to send customers home empty-handed, because their orders had not been delivered,” explains pharmacist Huong Bom.  “Customers would call us in advance to ask about the status of their prescription to make sure their trip would be worthwhile,” continued Bom’s colleague, Thi Tran.  Both pharmacists work at Groot Driene pharmacy in Hengelo, a medium-sized pharmacy.  With the goal of better informing its customers and increasing customer satisfaction, Medsen Apotheken turned to technology to resolve this issue.  They collaborated with Datalogic Business Partner Viridis Nederland in Naarden.

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Seagull Scientific’s BarTender design software has been the leading application to create any kind of barcode or RFID label and ID cards for customers due to it’s comprehensive feature set and ease of use. One of the key benefits of BarTender is the various available editions it comes in.

BarTender’s four editions enable you to easily upgrade your system as your business grows, without the extra cost and complexity of buying add-on products.

Basic Edition
Designed for individuals and small departments, the Basic Edition lets you start designing and printing barcode labels and cards in just minutes thanks to its intuitive design tools and helpful wizards.

• Design and print labels, cards, mag stripe cards and more
• Optimize print speed to any printer or marking device
• Design data-entry forms that provide data validation and accept print-time input from the keyboard or a barcode scanner
• Licensed per PC

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With 90% of retail sales still happening at the store-level, it’s unacceptable for consumers to wait in long check-out lines, or hunt for a associate to ask about product availability. The integration of digital solutions is forcing retailers to transition traditional POS functionality beyond merely checking out customers. The omichannel world continues to change the breadth of retailing, and stores must learn to adapt.

Many retailers are exploring how to implement evolving business concepts as a means to stay relevant in an always-on business environment, they must move beyond traditional point-of-sale (POS) systems toward the next-generation “omni-terminal.”

Learn more about how you can transform the customer experience in this e-book

Consumer satisfaction with the quality of your products is clearly important, but the service you provide before and after the sale is equally important to any business, but often overlooked as benefiting the bottom line. However, providing efficient tracking and tracing of shipped products enhances customer loyalty and your company image. Obviously, satisfied customers are a company’s greatest asset.

Track/Trace solutions including software and Automatic identification technologies such as barcoding and RFID are both reliable and effective in ensuring the efficient delivery of materials and components to you and to your customers.

According to Claes Fornell, University of Michigan, Ross School of Business and The American Customer Satisfaction Index, “As long as repeat business is important, and as long as customers have a chance to go somewhere else, employees must deliver high levels of satisfaction for a company to be successful.” In other words, satisfied customers often become repeat customers and one way to ensure satisfaction is to provide complete visibility from sale to delivery.

Simply stated, an efficient logistics supply chain accurately tracks and traces the delivered materials used to create finished products and then stores the inventory until picking, packing, shipping, and delivery of sold products are completed.

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