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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The Granit user guide has a performance chart that says – “Granit 1980i/1981i Scanner Typical Performance (200 lux).   So what is this “lux” thing?

Lux is the amount of ambient light in the area.  A full sun, no clouds in the sky, summer day would be considered about 100,000 Lux.  A completely dark area with no ambient light at all would be 0 Lux.  A typical office environment is usually between 500 – 700 Lux.  Granit scanner are used typically in a warehouse which are usually dimmer than offices.  It would be safe to say that a warehouse would measure about 200 Lux of ambient lighting.

Having some of the industries most popular and capable label printers goes hand-in-hand with premium supplies for them. From simple direct thermal shipping labels to rugged polyester labels for outdoor use, Honeywell has supplies to handle the requirements of the most demanding environments.

Honeywell genuine labels, RFID tags, receipts and ribbons support a broad range of barcode printing applications in mild to harsh environments. While a wide variety of these are offered as take-from-stock products for fast delivery, Honeywell will also customize the label material, configuration, size or any other feature to meet even the most challenging environment. Whether an off-the-shelf or custom solution, Honeywell has media solutions to meet any unique requirement.

To learn more about Honeywell’s selection of labels, receipt paper, wristbands, and RFID tags, contact one of our media specialists at Barcodes Inc.

Former small business owner and Heartland lending expert Damon Maletta has been an advocate for merchants seeking loans. He penned the article “What to Know Before You Owe,” reviewing and rating financing sources available for small businesses based on speed, transparency and risk. He also shared his own personal experience when trying to secure a loan as a business owner. His lending story is a cautionary tale on how to detect deception when partnering with a merchant cash advance (MCA) provider.

To add to his wisdom and excellent tips, here’s how you can avoid putting your cash flow and business at risk with an MCA. Be aware that hiding the true costs of their offerings and repayment terms is a reoccurring issue with MCA providers. Many will even modify the terms of a loan midstream.

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A stable, reliable wireless network has become a core utility for every business today. More so than other business technology, your network has to be able to adapt to the ever changing needs of wireless users.

Zebra’s WiNG Express helps small to mid-size organizations better compete by providing a true enterprise class WLAN that delivers the dependable and secure high performance wireless voice and data required to achieve best-in-class operational efficiency and deliver best-in-class customer service. From the retail store to the warehouse, a production line in a small manufacturing plant or patient bedside in a small hospital, with WiNG Express, you can provide the best wireless experience to your users that’s affordable and easy to manage.

Key Benefits of WiNG Express

• Real enterprise class wireless network performance for small to mid-size organizations with 1 to 1,024 access points.
• A robust enterprise-class WLAN you can easily deploy in minutes.
• The ability to start small and easily scale to support new business needs and a growing workforce.
• Powerful analytics to best manage your WLAN network and its performance.
• Attractive price point for small- to mid-size enterprise-class WLANs — without compromising on enterprise-class functionality

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Simple regular maintenance on your printer can be the key factor in getting the most out of your printer, printhead, and supplies.

The Sato CL4NX and CL6NX series of printers represents their next generation of thermal printers with advanced support for barcode symbologies, character sets and RFID encoding. A product of Sato’s global R&D network the NX Series incorporates value-added features in a world-class design to deliver a printing solution that goes beyond expectations.

There is a mode titled “Hand Held Scanning – Mobile Phone” that optimizes your scanner to read bar codes from mobile phones and other LED displays.  It does this in part by flickering the LEDs.  Last week a business was having trouble reading barcodes off of his laptop so we told him to turn the feature on (by scanning the barcode).  And of course he stopped having trouble.  Note that you don’t have to have this feature on when scanning barcodes off of phones/tablets.  It just helps the cause sometimes.

I wanted to know what the impact was on scanning speed when scanning regular barcodes when this feature was turned on.  So I tested it.

The results – the Xenon 1900 is a little slower (about 15%) with this feature turned on.  That sounds like a lot but the difference in speed really isn’t noticeable.  The Xenon still blows through my scanner board.

So don’t hesitate to use this feature if the application calls for it – even if other barcodes are being scanned that aren’t on a phone or a computer screen.

Shielded Illumination. What is it? In short, it’s a Honeywell-designed feature that minimizes the light emitted from a scanner preventing operators and customers from getting their eyes zapped by the barcode scanner. It significantly reduces the intense illumination often associated with imaging-based scanners.

Is it important? Yes! It allows retailers to manage their point of sale operations quickly, efficiently, and without any customer complaints.