Alliance Tech combines mobile computers, fixed mount RFID readers, RFID printers to conduct event attendance, lead generation, visitor statistics, attendee networking and mobile point of sale solutions.

Executive Summary

Alliance Tech offers value-added services at trade shows and large events by providing accurate, real-time data as well as summary statistics and reports about attendees to exhibitors. Their customers know who entered their booth and how long they visited. Alerts are sent in real-time when high profile visitors are present. Sales organizations present are able to collect order information and lead reports without need to return to their offices. Additionally, visitors are provided a paperless solution that provides event information including maps, schedules, and contact information.

The Business Challenge

Alliance Tech was outfitted with discontinued mobile computers that had lower resolution, less memory, an outdated operating system, and no radio. The exhibitors and organizers at trade show events needed to maximize their investment of time and resources dedicated to each event. Continue reading »

Challenge

J & D Pharmacy has been in business for more than 30 years. As an independently owned pharmacy, J & D Pharmacy owner Don Grove understands the pressure to provide superior customer service, added value and combat increasing competition. Fortunately Mr. Grove is a technology adopter, not afraid to try anything that will improve business and customer satisfaction overall.

Scenario

When J & D Pharmacy set out to replace its Pharmacy Management software they were also looking for ways to improve workflow in the pharmacy operation. J & D Pharmacy chose Computer-Rx because it was the most user friendly Windows-based software system and because they offered excellent support.

This level of support went beyond technical support. Computer-Rx recommended that J & D Pharmacy replace its Lexmark laser printers with the CognitiveTPG CRx printer for printing the prescription labels. It was not difficult to convince Mr. Grove that the CRx thermal label printer was the best solution for his operation.

Solution

“When you are printing over 10,000 prescription labels a month it is important to optimize the workflow to save time. We saw the CRx printer as a perfect fit for a stand alone solution in our pharmacy operation,” said Jennifer Jelinek, Director of Pharmacy Operations at J & D Pharmacy.

While workflow is important, the driving force behind making this technology upgrade was the cost savings both in terms of the cost of the barcode labels and the cost from the downtime.

“We found that the printers paid for themselves within a month and the technicians were spending more time filling prescriptions than fixing a laser printer jam,” said Don Grove, J & D Pharmacy owner.

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The Sunglasses Shop bills itself as a customer-driven establishment where shoppers come first. The family-owned “Mom and Pop” store offers 2,500 pairs of sunglasses in a wide range of brands, styles and prices, as well as sunglass-related items.

After installing a Star TSP700 thermal receipt printer, store personnel can quickly and easily generate receipts that show where, when and at what price shoppers bought their sunglasses and/or accessories. Customers who need subsequent assistance with their purchases or have general questions need only refer to their receipt and bring it to the store for assistance; there is, states Keel, no chance that they are dealing with a merchant that isn’t on the up-and-up. Two-color receipt printing occurs at a high speed of 7.09 inches per second, while such features as “Drop in & Print” paper loading and an easy-to-change, cartridge-type interface minimizes printing delays. A logo storage utility allows logos to be added to receipts without difficulty.

Not long ago, The Sunglass Shop upgraded its point of sale system and needed to install printer drivers in its TSP700 printer so that the two devices would interface with each other. Keel tried to do the job alone, but was unsuccessful. A quick telephone call to Star Micronics’ technical support department solved the problem. Tech support personnel walked Keel through the process, and everything was up and running within minutes.

“Again, we can print receipts on demand with no trouble,” Keel concludes. “That leads to better customer service”—just what The Sunglasses Shop on Ocracoke is all about.

Executive Summary

University Community Health was in search of a 2D barcode scanner that could interact with its Panasonic Toughbook T8 to increase point-of-care safety and ensure the Five Rights initiative – right patient, right drug, right time, right dose, and right form. The solution replaces a pen and paper process with the introduction of a software driver, customized by Barcodes Inc, which allows the Honeywell 2D barcode scanners to communicate with the Panasonic Toughbooks.

Challenge

Driven by hospital specific directives to ensure the right hospital staff was prescribing the right medication to the right patients, hospitals are beginning to invest in barcode-based systems to ensure patient charting is performed electronically.

For patients being administered several forms of medication, healthcare providers routinely deployed a pen and paper patient charting solution that resulted in manual errors ranging from incorrect prescriptions provided to patients to unqualified hospital personnel administering medication. Due to a limited write space available on patient charts, the net result was an ineffective pen and paper process that was incapable of generating specific history of what hospital professional administered what dose at what time, thus reducing patient safety.

University Community Health Hospital decided to invest in an electronic solution to replace patient charts, including the capability to reduce manual errors and increase its space capability by providing nurses with Panasonic Toughbooks. However, the nurses soon realized that the solution, although safer for patients, was very tedious and demanded more time with each patient. Hospital employees were still required to include as much, if not more, patient information, as well as detailing all medication administered at precise times to each patient.

University Community Health was in search of a quicker, more effective solution that would not compromise its patients’ safety.

Solution

In response to the hospital’s need for a more effective solution, Barcodes Inc customized a software driver that would allow the Panasonic T8 Toughbooks to interface with the Honeywell 4600g HD and 4820HDHM barcode scanners. This solution allowed nurses the ability to scan all medication and patient information, while eliminated the requirement to manually input all the information into the Toughbooks. The solution is designed to allow nurses to scan a medication and patient wristband to ensure that the right prescription is going to the right patient. Additionally, after the patient consumes the right medication, the nurse validates that it has been administered by once again scanning the patient’s wristband.

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Challenge: Improve labeling operations in order to concentrate on customer relations

Combining the concepts of travel and decoration, Maisons du Monde is a retailer specializing in furniture and interior decoration with 200 shops. A true success story, the retailer has been able to rise to prominence in a booming market and expand to several European countries in less than 15 years.

Maisons du Monde’s original positioning and its collections that are renewed continuously to adapt to current trends are the retailer’s winning qualities. In this logistical environment where the management of stock and collections is essential, the French brand has decided to turn to various technological partners who can introduce an innovative marking and identification system.

In order to enable its shop assistants to concentrate on the customers rather than on restrictive and particularly time-consuming labeling operations, the retailer wanted to introduce modern and progressive mobile technologies for item labeling and in-store inventory management of different collections.

Maisons du Monde turned to industrial partners specializing in marking and printing who were capable of implementing a universal solution very quickly in all shops in France.

A few essential requirements were established in order to deal with the enormity of the project and the extremely short deadline:

• “PDA/mobile printers” materials must ensure that items are handled rapidly, while making employees fully mobile
• Predominantly centralized technical support management must enable each shop to be run remotely without requiring a technician to work on-site

“In contrast to large-scale food retail, specialist retailers, such as Maisons du Monde do not have a digital price display system using electronic labels, enabling prices to be modified remotely. In-store relabeling and stocktaking are carried out manually and require significant attention; a pricing error has irreparable negative consequences on customers”, explains Guillaume Cesbron, chief information officer at Maisons du Monde. ” Faced with this problem, we therefore looked for a fully mobile, non cumbersome, highly reliable material and software solution, that used portable PDA mobile devices linked to wireless printers“, he adds.

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Every day, millions of people drive into gas stations to refuel their cars without giving a thought to the process of how that fuel gets there when they need it. Genesis Crude Oil plays a central role in transporting fuel to gas stations in the Gulf Coast region of the Unites States, which encompasses the states of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.

Genesis Crude Oil is a division of Houston-based Genesis Energy, a growth-oriented company with a diverse portfolio of customers, operations, and assets, including refinery-related plants, pipelines, storage tanks, and terminals The primary function of Genesis Crude Oil is moving crude oil, via trucks, from pumping stations to strategically located storage facilities, where the product is held until it’s time to move it to a refinery.

To make sure its deliveries always flow smoothly, Genesis Crude Oil equipped its fleet of trucks with the OmniTRACS® Mobile Information System from Qualcomm Enterprise Services. This system allows Genesis dispatchers to maintain contact with all drivers at all times. “We can use the OmniTRACS® System to send messages to drivers in places that cell phones don’t reach,” says Terry Lincecum, Louisiana district manager for Genesis Crude Oil.

The system, which relies on satellite technology, also sends data about conditions on the truck—such as its current location or the temperature and weight of the product being carried—back to regional headquarters. “If there’s a problem with one of our trucks after it leaves the pick-up location, we can find out about it before the driver reports it,” Lincecum says. That’s an important capability, because drivers are picking up crude oil from pumping stations in remote areas, and having to wait for drivers to be in cell phone range to learn about problems could delay finding solutions.

Problem

About a year ago, as the Louisiana region was adding new trucks to its fleet, Lincecum discovered a way to make the OmniTRACS® System even more valuable: he upgraded the printers they use with the system. Genesis Crude Oil drivers rely on wireless mobile printers to generate receipts confirming the contents of the loads they pick up from each customer. The driver also keeps a copy of the receipt to use as a manifest if a Department of Transportation inspector asks for documentation of the truck’s contents.

The information on that receipt also is transmitted, via the OmniTRACS® System, to Genesis Crude Oil headquarters, facilitating accurate recordkeeping. “As we were adding the new trucks, we realized that the printers we were using were becoming obsolete,” Lincecum recalls. One clue to this obsolescence was the increased frequency with which those printers were being repaired. After reviewing the costs of those ongoing repairs, Lincecum thought it was time to consider replacing them.

Solution

Genesis Crude Oil selected the Datamax microFlash 4te wireless portable thermal transfer printer. The 4te is the latest version of Datamax-O’Neil’s legendary 4t printer, the industry’s leading portable thermal printer and the defacto standard for route accounting and field mobile printing applications.

To accommodate the need for faster transaction processing in the fast-paced world of mobile field applications, the 4te printer incorporates a new, 32-bit RISC ARM 9 processor that allows the printer to process complex applications up to ten times faster, and enables the user to enjoy exceptionally high print throughput. It can print up to 2,240, 6-inch receipts on a single battery charge with automated, power-saving sleep and wake-up modes.

That printing capability was a selling point for Genesis Crude Oil, which was getting complaints from drivers about having to replace the paper in the older printers too often. But the most attractive feature of the 4te, according to Lincecum, was the newly developed kit for pairing the printer with the Qualcomm OmniTRACS® System. The kit made the transition to the new printer seamless. “Our drivers and customers really like these new printers,” Lincecum says. “The drivers like them because they don’t have to change the paper as often; that improves their efficiency. Customers like them because the print quality is much better. The receipts are much easier to read.”

Results

Lincecum says Genesis Crude Oil is pleased that the 4te is continuing the Datamax-O’Neil tradition for product reliability. After six years in the field, fewer than 10 percent of the units have ever been in a repair facility, even though they operate in harsh industrial environments.

“We don’t have nearly as much downtime now,” Lincecum says. “With our previous printers, when one went down, the driver would have to locate another truck nearby and wait for that driver to show up to print a receipt for the customer. We haven’t had those issues with the Datamax-O’Neil printers.”

Gruppo Maiorana, One of Italy’s Largest Food Distributors Chooses Datalogic Scanning’s PowerScan Readers to Outfit Cash & Carry Outlets

Overview

Gruppo Maiorana S.p.A. is the holding company of one of the strongest leaders in the food distribution market as well as one of the largest commercial real estate holders in central and southern Italy. Gruppo Maiorana’s extensive field experience, local market knowledge and professionalism are among the factors that have contributed most to its growth.

The operating companies of the group include Maiorana Maggiorino S.p.A., a commercial market service company handling food distribution and wholesale cash & carry outlets, and Emme Più S.r.l., a retail company that directly manages a chain of supermarkets and hypermarkets.

The Challenge

Although Gruppo Maiorana is a 35 year industry veteran, it has the characteristics of a modern company with new facilities dedicated to monitoring business management, marketing and information systems. With these facilities, Gruppo Maiorana’s ceD department (Centro Elaborazione Dati or Data Processing Center) is able to develop all IT projects internally. using the most competent, leading-edge hardware, this department led Gruppo Maiorana to become one of the first to install cordless bar code readers at its cash & carry outlet, Maiorana Maggiorino.

With the intention of equipping their stores with powerful tools to optimize business processes, Maiorana Maggiorino decided to invest in a new bar code scanning solution to upgrade its point-of-sale (POS) systems. since Maiorana Maggiorino carries over 30,000 different products, the hardware needed to be able to read diverse bar code symbologies (i.e. 1D linear and stacked codes) in all types of quality. The solution also needed to be cordless to provide the operator with the freedom to move, especially with two operators working: one to scan the customer’s items and the other to complete the transaction.

The Solution

After testing, Maiorana Maggiorino purchased Datalogic’s Powerscan PM8300-D readers with display screen to handle transactions at the Pos. “Datalogic scanning’s proven reliability and excellent reputation combined with the field testing of several other Auto ID technologies made us confident in selecting the Powerscan PM8300 readers,” said Fabio Mancini, Purchasing and ceD Manager, Gruppo Maiorana S.p.A.

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Epson CaptureOne Provides Top Check Scanning Accuracy and Reliability

A Association for Financial Professionals Show, Epson announced that Huntington Bank will offer Epson’s award-winning CaptureOne line of check scanners to complement its remote deposit capture (RDC) solutions. Available immediately to the bank’s corporate and commercial customers, Epson’s CaptureOne check scanner enables fast, two-sided check scanning with the highest MICR accuracy in its class and an industry-leading two-year warranty. In addition to offering Epson’s CaptureOne check scanners, Huntington uses Epson’s TM-H6000III for reliable printing and validation at teller stations throughout many of its branch offices.

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Solution Increases Productivity, Streamlines Books on Hold Labeling Process

The Epson TM-T88iv ReStick thermal printer is now being used in ten public libraries to improve the circulation desk book reservation process. The Epson solution has increased productivity due to less staffing required and fewer hours spent emptying and checking in boxes from other libraries to accommodate customer hold requests.

Libraries have traditionally utilized a cumbersome, manual book reservation process involving rubber bands, scrap paper, masking tape and handwritten notes. This error-prone, outdated method has been updated with the Epson TM-T88 ReStick solution, which allows staff to print labels which can be applied to books without any damage or sticky residue. Using the ReStick solution has streamlined the book reservation process, cut back staffing requirements and increased overall productivity at circulation desks.

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Epson announced that one of its valued partners has installed its TM-J9100 check scanner with integrated printer in over fifty community banks nationwide. Epson’s TM-J9100 is paired with software to perform check processing at the teller window. Customer deposits are scanned and imaged at the point of presentment, and back room tasks are performed using the scanned images. With this combined solution, checks are only handled once, which means fewer and faster transactions, and more efficient customer service. The fifty banks using the Epson solution range in size from under $12M to $350M, and are located throughout the United States.

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