Barcoding News

Here’s a summary of what’s new in Seagull Bartender 9.3. For more extensive details on all of the new features, please see What’s New in BarTender 9.3 (PDF).

The World’s Most Powerful Scale Support

BarTender can now directly accept data from weighing scales. Simply drag the scale control from the on-screen toolbox into a data entry form, specify the desired model, and start weighing and printing!

• • Easy Design: Simply “drag and drop” into forms. (Choose from 8 different scale displays.)
  • Compatible: Predefined support for a variety of industry-standard scale models.
  • Tare Support: Use the value built into the scale or source it from a field in your database.
  • Versatile: Have either your scale or your PC determine when you have a “stable weight.”

More Powerful Print-Time Data Entry Forms

Now it’s easier than ever to design powerful, user-friendly data entry forms when it is desirable to prompt users for certain data at print-time.

• • New Controls: Many more data entry objects, including radio buttons, check boxes, weighing scales, and pictures.
  • Drag and Drop: Create controls and link them to label data sources with simple mouse motions.
  • More Versatile: Now, optionally design forms without designing your labels first.
  • Automatic Text: Most form controls are now automatically created with text objects right next to them, which saves you that extra step.
  • Pop-Up Tips: Optionally pop up helpful hints when your users hover their cursor over selected form controls.

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Interactive Multimedia, Cordless Bluetooth, Barcode Scanning, Linux Operating System and Top Security Deliver Revolutionary Multi-Purpose Capabilities and Flexibility

Hypercom Corporation today introduced the L5000, a revolutionary new product family of customer-facing, multipurpose, multimedia payment terminals featuring the broadest range of functional and communication capabilities for the widest spectrum of multilane retailers.

Hypercom’s L5000 family represents the industry’s most comprehensive line of high performance, multilane terminals that will connect to any point-of-sale register system with any communications protocol including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth®.

The new product lineup enables multiple in-store use beyond the traditional checkout line, including in-aisle product locating, barcode price checking, health insurance card processing at the pharmacy, gift card loading and wedding registry processing at kiosks.

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Challenge

Philips Semiconductors is a top 10 supplier of semiconductors with several top three positions in targeted markets such as RFID technology, where over 1 billion chips are sold into RFID & contactless smartcard markets. From its manufacturing facility in Kaohsiung Taiwan, to its distribution center in Hong Kong alone, the company ships and tracks several million wafer cases and carton packages per year. To ensure warehouse efficiency and customer service satisfaction, Philips’ semiconductor manufacturing and distribution supply chain must operate at the most efficient levels of inventory turns, stacked lead time and delivery reliability.

Philips looked to the latest in radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to improve efficiency in its supply chain. A leader in the RFID market, Philips has been offering business improvement solutions to its customers since 1988. “We decided to take the RFID technology we’ve been offering customers and use it internally to get the benefits ourselves,” said Mathieu Clerkx, CIO and senior vice president, Philips Semiconductors. “We have a great deal of experience in providing RFID chips to the market, and we decided it was time for us to benefit from the technology ourselves by implementing it in our own supply chain.”

With implementation costs of RFID in the supply chain still high, and the long time needed to achieve quantity at a low cost, most vendors have taken a ‘wait and see’ attitude. Philips knew that RFID would be advantageous to its business processes and thus to its customers. This was the impetus for Philips: to prove that RFID could benefit the integral supply chain and at the same time, be at the forefront to showcase a successful deployment of RFID on such a large scale. With goods being RFID-ready, Philips and its customers could benefit from low cost and time efficiency. This in turn would eventually generate maximum returns on investment.

As with all changes to existing workflows, it was necessary for Philips to first identify the areas which could benefit from the introduction of RFID. Philips decided to carry out an initial rollout in Kaohsiung Taiwan manufacturing facility and Hong Kong and identified a number of processes in both locations which could be improved. The company then developed a view of the future processes they wanted to implement and installed a change process to manage the transition. As RFID technology addresses operating efficiencies, Philips focused on getting benefits as quickly as possible by addressing those areas which would gain most.

Solution

Philips chose Zebra Technologies as a partner in the project because of its diverse product portfolio and leadership in RFID. Globally, Zebra and Philips already had a long history of collaboration on RFID projects. As a pioneer in RFID printing/encoding technologies, Zebra has been researching and developing RFID ‘smart label’ technologies for over 10 years and was the first company to produce an integrated, on-demand RFID printer/encoder. Zebra has been working with some of the industry’s foremost technology companies in the advancement and development of RFID solutions.

An RFID test lab in one of Philips’ warehouses was set up by Zebra to conduct the initial tests, where Philips analyzed the results to calculate the potential ROI and benefit to customers. Based on the potential savings the RFID system delivered and the effective trial run, the company’s senior management made the decision to deploy the technology throughout the Kaohsiung and Hong Kong supply chain operations.

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The company: Southeastern Container

Southeastern Container was formed in 1982 as a privately owned company under the ownership of a group of Coca-Cola® Bottling companies. Today the company operates as a manufacturing co-op with ten manufacturing locations producing plastic bottles. Southeastern Container handles nearly 70 percent of the bottle production for Coca-Cola in the U.S. and also works with bottle manufacturers outside of the co-op. The company keeps quality and service high with a focus on continuous improvement.

The challenge: Inventory control and traceability for specialized product containers

With roots in the southeastern U.S., Southeastern Container now has ten manufacturing facilities across the East Coast, Illinois and Wisconsin. At the company’s three injection molding facilities, bottle blanks called preforms are manufactured. The plastic preforms are blown into bottles at Southeastern Container’s blow-molding facilities and at bottle manufacturers outside of the co-op.

The preforms are shipped to bottle manufacturing plants in cardboard containers or existing plastic bins. Ideally, these containers are returned empty to the injection molding facilities to repeat the cycle. However, problems with this return process were costing Southeastern Container thousands of dollars each year.

Some containers are lost or damaged in transit and must be replaced. In addition, the design of the existing containers prohibits Southeastern Container from maximizing the capacity of shipping trailers, resulting in the company paying to ship “air” for each load. Finally, cardboard containers are often pre-assembled to save time, and the fully assembled containers take up warehouse floor space. In the process of shipping billions of preforms, these issues add up.

Southeastern Container planned to address these problems by replacing the existing containers with a new version — a specialized returnable plastic bin. While the new folding bins are designed to significantly reduce costs and increase efficiency, each of them is nearly ten times the cost of a cardboard container. Thus, cycle counting would be introduced to track bin lifetimes against the number of cycles guaranteed by the manufacturer.

“We decided to cycle count for inventory control, traceability, and to validate bin lifetime, and we chose RFID tracking as the most effective method,” said John Underwood, Engineering Manager, Southeastern Container, Inc. “We already use barcoding extensively, and have looked at RFID on a number of occasions during the years. RFID was the right choice now because it’s affordable and the technology is at a point where it can provide the reliability and accuracy we need,” Underwood explained.

The solution: RFID system with Motorola handheld RFID readers and fixed readers and antennas

Southeastern Container worked with Motorola to architect an entire end-to-end solution to tackle this challenge. The system implementation started with a pilot RFID system for cycle counting the new bins. The solution includes Motorola XR440 industrial-class fixed RFID readers, Motorola AN400 RFID antennas, Motorola MC9090-G RFID rugged handheld readers, and OATSystems’ Oat Asset Track software. In addition, Southeastern Container relies on the Motorola Service from the Start program for repair coverage for its Motorola RFID handheld readers. They worked very hard to analyze the RFID tag selection with the Motorola devices to maximize successful reads for both full and empty bins.

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Mastering the POS basics – quickly

As Rod Works was growing its business, the company struggled to find the right point of sale (POS) solution. In trying out various options, Rod Works fell into the same conundrum faced by many smaller retail businesses. Affordable POS systems marketed to small business lacked the high-level inventory functionality of the enterprise-sized systems used by large chain retailers. Yet these costlier solutions were too time-consuming for the small retailer to learn and use.

“POS software should change your business to be more effective, not change your business just to use the software,” said Aaron Brackett, retail director for Rod Works. “We built our business in a what-if environment, where we continually evaluated best-case and worst-case scenarios for the future. That way, we could weather various financial circumstances and challenging economic times. As a result, we wanted a POS solution that provided great management insight and could grow with us over time – without costing a fortune.”

Five years ago, Rod Works purchased QuickStore POS from Wasp Barcode Technologies. Because the enterprise version of the software offers multi-location functionality, as the company grew it was able to install QuickStore at each of its four retail locations and two clearance centers, as well as its corporate headquarters and warehouse.

Designed for specialty stores, Wasp QuickStore strives to offer smaller retailers the same kinds of efficiencies that larger chains already enjoy from their expensive
enterprise-version POS products. These include high-end capabilities such as automated inventory tracking, e-mail invoices, report generation and more.

From shuffling items to managing inventory

Once Wasp QuickStore was in place as a checkout tool, customer satisfaction quickly increased. Rod Works then was ready to tackle its greatest challenge: bridging the gap between the warehouse and retail stores.

“We had struggled with this for years,” Brackett said. “We didn’t have an efficient way to identify store needs from the warehouse. This affected the entire process, from transferring product to the stores all the way up to product purchases. Too often, we had products sitting on warehouse shelves instead of store shelves.”

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Mired in spreadsheets

To serve its thousands of customers, Amarillo National Bank ordered large quantities of supplies, including deposit slips, banking forms, pens, paper and more. It relied on between 50 and 60 outside vendors to supply about 160 different items.

The purchasing department at the bank’s headquarters would order and store supplies for all 13 of its branch offices. When an individual office needed to replenish items, it would send a requisition to headquarters. The purchasing department would package and ship out the needed supplies.

Unfortunately, the bank’s inventory was being managed manually on two complex Excel spreadsheets. The first spreadsheet, which tracked vendors, featured between 50 and 60 tabs (one for each vendor) and 160 rows (one for each item). As items were received in stock, they were noted in the appropriate cell. Managing this spreadsheet took about one and a half to two hours per week. Plus, the process was prone to errors. If an error was inadvertently entered, back-tracking to find and correct the data was both time-consuming and frustrating.

The second spreadsheet included about 40 tabs (13 for branch offices and others for the various departments at headquarters), plus about 160 rows (one for each item). When a branch office or department faxed a requisition form, the purchasing agent would note in the spreadsheet which items were ordered. Each week, the agent spent from one and a half to two hours tabulating the orders for various departments and branches. The resulting sheet was sent to the accounting department, which would generate invoices for each branch office and department.

Because of the complexity of this process, numerous delays and errors would occur as the bank worked each month to reconcile inventory on hand and determine which items should be billed back to branch offices and departments.

The accounting department struggled to keep up with this time-consuming process. As a result, billing was constantly behind. This led to significant inventory write-offs of tens of thousands of dollars per year, since the bank could not account for the location of inventory items and bill for them in a timely manner.

Assigning costs – automatically

The bank knew it needed to eliminate the cost of inventory write-offs. Plus, accounting and purchasing personnel wanted an easier, faster way to order and account for items.

The bank purchased Wasp Inventory Control Pro, software that helps small businesses and departments within larger organizations know exactly how much inventory they have, where it is located, and what’s moving and what’s not.

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Lost in the crowd

With over 70,000 students and employees, Lone Star College System (LSCS) owns and operates over 30,000 IT assets. Each of the community college’s five campuses and seven satellite centers was responsible for tracking its own equipment, including laptops, projectors, servers and switches. Many of the locations utilized Access databases or Excel spreadsheets for managing assets.

Relying on a manual asset tracking solution created multiple problems for technology managers and administration. Without a centralized database, it was difficult to locate specific IT assets.

The LSCS Vice Chancellor and CIO, Shah Ardalan, made having complete and accurate data a priority, and increased technology management accountability system-wide. An asset management solution was necessary to effectively track equipment lifecycles.

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CVS Corporation is the United States’ largest retail drug store chain. CVS attained this position through aggressive marketing and growth strategies that included the acquisitions of rival chains, Arbor Drug and Revco. Headquartered in Rhode Island, the CVS organization currently counts over 4,100 stores operating in 28 states. CVS employs over 100,000 people and is still growing.

CVS recognized that sheer size alone would not assure future market leadership. Technology would have a significant role to play in the chain’s growth and helping to maintain its competitive edge. So, the drug store leader turned to Symbol Technologies, the wireless technology leader, to improve worker productivity, inventory management and customer service through the implementation of Symbol-based solutions.

The Challenge: Maximize Store Efficiencies

Intense competition in the drug store industry forces players to rely on low prices, wide selections, fast turnaround and slim margins. As such, the technology solution implemented must maximize store associate productivity and enhance customer satisfaction while serving multiple functions.

Imagine the complexities of coordinating merchandise receiving and inventory logistics for a retail operation selling everything from prescription drugs to greeting cards. On any day, there could be hundreds of trucks moving between thousands of stores across the country. And with every shipment comes the related inventory and putaway tasks, as well as shelf stocking, price checking and item reordering activities.

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Stanley Steemer performs on-site carpet cleaning and floor-care services nationwide. Thousands of technicians are in the field daily fulfilling orders, selling, routing to various job sites, and recording and reporting completed transactions back to a central office. The task of managing all of these transactions and company assets can be daunting.

For decades, Stanley Steemer relied on a paper-based process for order taking and fulfillment, payment processing and dispatch. The process was time consuming and at times inaccurate.

In the mid-1990s, Stanley Steemer International, Inc. began researching hardware and working with prototype applications to move the company’s system from a paper solution to an electronic process. Stanley Steemer first trialed consumer-grade handheld computers and implemented a prototype system in 2002. This system proved ineffective because of the device’s lower durability in comparison to a ruggedized commercial-grade solution. Stanley Steemer also quickly learned that this type of system lacked many of the capabilities inherent in a commercial grade device.

“We learned quickly that this type of equipment wasn’t going to work because of durability and capability limitations,” said Dale Bevins, IT Director, Stanley Steemer International, Inc. “We determined that deploying a commercial grade handheld computer to meet the challenging demands placed on the equipment was our only option.”

In 2005, Stanley Steemer turned to Intermec for the company’s ruggedized Intermec 761 handheld computers and PW40 mobile printers. Stanley Steemer now uses more than 900 Intermec handheld computers, printers and accessories at over 60 different branches, satellites and franchises across the U.S. and estimates a complete branch/satellite rollout by January 2007. To help monitor assets, Stanley Steemer has also deployed WebTech GPS boxes mounted inside Stanley Steemer service vehicles.

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For media wholesaler Super D, the “unplugged” movement in the music industry has reaped million-dollar rewards. The company has a 45,000-square-foot warehouse full of music, sitting in bins and ready to move. Among rows of compact discs, cassette odd vinyl albums are the industry’s elite: compilations that have connected so powerfully with the public that they have sold a million units or more. Now the company is ready to reap yet another “unplugged” million-dollar reward – with a wireless mobile system from Intermec.

Three years ago, Super D Chairman and Chief Technology Officer David Hurwitz began casting about for a way to make his company stronger, more resilient. “We’ve lost a bunch of competitors in the last couple years,” he said, “primarily because with shrinking margins in a shrinking market, if you don’t have your systems in place to get every last nickel and dime you can, you’re dead. We’ve been investing in the technology side so much that it’s paid off.”

The new wireless system included handheld computers from Intermec Technologies Corp., integrated Great Plains software and Microsoft SQL servers.

That move transformed Super D’s warehouse operations, enhancing not only its speed and accuracy, but slashing overall warehouse costs, letting Super D keep more money from every sale. How much more? Three years ago Super D’s warehouse costs were running at 4 percent. Today that cost is down to 1.8 percent. Using current sales figures, warehouse cost savings for fiscal year 2003 total more than $1 million. “As sales continue to grow, that number’s just going to keep getting better,” Hurwitz said.

Twenty-five Intermec 2425® radio-frequency (RF) keypad handheld computers comprise the new system’s front end. They replaced the old method, which Hurwitz described as using “our hands and a clipboard” to pick from and stock the 150,000 bins at the Irvine, Calif., company.

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