Barcoding News

Viking Direct is a provider of office supplies, based in Germany, which serves the entire European market. It promotes its products through catalogs and the majority of its customers are small and medium sized companies. The company has 600 employees in the German cities of Großostheim and Munich. A third office is scheduled to open in Hamburg later this year. Due to the bar code labeling of products, Viking has been able to meet its ambitious service objectives by delivering products within 24 hours of having received the order.

Previously at Viking
Frank Frost is the IT team leader who provides technical support on a local basis and supervises the work of his six-member team based in Germany, Holland and Belgium. His responsibilities include training employees to manage IT issues and to resolve any problems that may arise locally.

“Viking used to experience difficulties with the bar code printers that were previously in use,” comments Frost. “This was mainly related to the layouts of labels, insufficient print speeds and weak networking capabilities. To add to the matter, all of Viking Direct’s printers are linked to the AS/400 platform, a link that often proved to be difficult to manage.”

Selection Process
“We started looking for a more effective solution. We sought expert opinion at various trade fair exhibitions and via the Internet,” Frost explains. “One of the most critical issues that we faced was how to access our printers in other regions of Europe or even the world. After all, we were looking to establish one consistent printing environment,” he adds. “Ideally, the new printers that Viking required would have to provide high printing speeds, ease of use and allow operators to enter commands in their own language in order to overcome any possible language barriers.”

After reviewing many different printers, Viking Direct chose Zebra’s 140XiIII printers because they fulfilled the criteria that Viking required. The integrated Ethernet adapter and user specific selection of languages were particular bonuses. The printers can easily be installed over the Internet and, therefore, be moved from one location to the next without difficulty. They are controlled through the AS/400, whereby label content is generated as a spool file directly from within the platform, forwarded to the printer and then printed on location. In order to reduce network traffic, logos are generally stored locally in each printer and then printed as part of each label.

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Highlights

• Forklift-mounted mobile printers cut travel time, reduced labeling errors, and increased throughput in the DC.
• Updated printing operations lowered supply costs.
• Driven natively from within PeopleSoft and other leading ERP software packages, Zebra printers’ ease of integration saves considerable time and costs.
• Four different types of Zebra printers are now used to handle various tasks through- out the company, all sharing a common printer language for ease of support and to share label formats.
• Zebra’s rugged and reliable printers support the broadest range of wireless security standards.

Challenge
Green Mountain Coffee Roasters was named one of America’s “100 Fastest-Growing Small Companies” by FORTUNE Small Business in 2006. The company was growing fast, but its main distribution center in Waterbury, Vt., was not. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters expected the facility to meet its needs for at least six years after it was built, but after three the DC was running at full capacity. The company needed to seek out new ways to make the distribution center more efficient, and to get more out of the capacity it had. Mobile printing was one of the answers to these challenges, making a key process more efficient to help Green Mountain keep up with its growing business.

Green Mountain coffee grew from a local favorite to a successful national brand through its mail-order catalog and Web site. More success followed. Green Mountain coffee is sold nationally under the famous Newman’s Own® Organics brands, and is served in McDonald’s restaurants throughout the Northeast. The company boasts more than 7,000 wholesale customers, was one of the first coffee companies to offer a successful Fair Trade Certified® product line, and ranked No. 1 on Business Ethics magazine’s list of “100 Best Corporate Citizens.”

In short, Green Mountain coffee is hot. Workload at its central distribution center was overheating. The facility runs three shifts and operates 24 hours a day to ship orders to customers and other distribution centers. The company needed to find new ways to keep up with the growing demand.

Solution
To support the output it needed, Green Mountain decided to increase automation at its main distribution center in Waterbury, Vt. Products are stored in aisles that are each 60 yards long. Material handling systems specialist Diamond Phoenix was contracted to develop a customized warehouse control system (WCS) to integrate with Green Mountain’s legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from PeopleSoft. A Zebra Technologies Premier Partner, recommended new bar code label printers and processes to provide more time savings and efficiency gains.

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Zebra’s new Xi4 Series offers faster print speed, outstanding print quality and unparalleled reliability

Zebra Technologies Corporation, a global leader in specialty printing and automatic identification solutions, announces the Xi4 Tabletop Printer Series, an all-metal line that offers rugged durability, outstanding print quality, fast print speed, long life and unparalleled reliability. The Zebra Xi4 Series is designed for applications with high duty cycles in harsh environments and improves on Zebra’s previous line of XiIIIPlus™ tabletop printers.

Zebra’s Xi Series high-performance printers have earned a reputation of standing up to the most demanding applications and delivering the power and reliability expected of a premium performance printer. The new Xi4 series builds on that heritage with four different models that include:

• 110Xi4: Zebra’s flagship printer, the 110Xi4 now delivers faster 14 ips print speeds and is designed for applications with high duty cycles in harsh environments.
• 140Xi4: The faster, durable, and reliable, 140Xi4 combines a 14 ips speed with ease of integration and mission-critical reliability.
• 170Xi4: Zebra’s high-performance, compliance-labeling solution, the 170Xi4 is ideal for AIAG, ODETTE, and UCC/EAN-128 labeling on demand or in batches.
• 220Xi4: The reliable 220Xi4 with advanced printer management tools is perfect for chemical-drum, banner-size, and other wide-label applications

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Intermec today announced the launch of the SD61, a multiport wireless base station that provides a secure connection (ISCP protocol) between multiple Intermec industrial scanners – including the SF51 and SR61B, and the host device. The SD61 allows up to seven Intermec Bluetooth-equipped scanners to operate in the same work area, connected wirelessly to the same mobile cart solution, PC or Intermec printer. By reducing the number of hosts, the SD61 delivers a quick ROI and a less cluttered work environment.

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New, improved firmware for the Honeywell 3800g and 3800gHD linear imagers is now available.

The firmware has all the same functionality as previous firmware and delivers additional benefits including improved ability to scan poor quality bar codes.

The prevalence of poor quality bar codes initiated the need for Honeywell to enhance the 3800g decoder by improving performance on poor quality without increasing the incidences of misreads and compromising the integrity of encoded data. Tests performed with the improved decoder show the 3800g is one of the top performers of reads vs no-reads, with virtually no misreads, thereby ensuring the reliability of the bar code symbol data.

Upgrades for scanners manufactured prior to October 5, 2009 can be downloaded for free from the Honeywell Scanning & Mobility website.

Challenge:
Moving inventory from dock to stock was a time- consuming, costly process that needed to be improved.

Solution:
Mobile-mounted printers, handheld terminals, and RF data communication enable receiving personnel to process incoming stock and deliver it to inventory.

Product:
Zebra® Encore 4TM mobile printers

As incoming inventory arrives on the receiving dock, it is unloaded onto a forklift. While the goods remain on the forklift, the operator simply keys in to the terminal the product and supplier. The terminal is linked by radio frequency (RF) communication to the automated warehouse host computer. Information on the incoming stock is accessed in seconds. The Zebra Encore 4 mobile thermal printer then prints a routing ticket indicating the specific warehouse location at which the material will be stocked. The operator can then proceed directly to the warehouse location to deliver the material.

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Objective:
Improve efficiency by enabling store staff to automatically print product labels when handheld terminals display a change of price.

Solution:
The roll-out of 300 QL 220 mobile printers for MIM stores

To boost its efficiency, the MIM chain has just equipped its stores with 300 QL 220 mobile printers. Integrated with the stores IT system, the printers have enabled the company to become more reactive, and store personnel can now do price checking and labeling tasks three times faster than before. MIM is extremely satisfied with this rise in productivity.

Benefits:
Time saved: price labeling is three times faster than the previous solution using a manual labeler.

Reduced risk of errors: data used for label printing is sent directly from the central store system. Staff do not need to enter this information, thereby reducing the risk of error.

Improvements in working conditions: ergonomically designed and very simply to maintain, the PDT and printer combination is easy to use.

Less development needed: implementing the QL 220 and interfacing it with the system, required almost no extra development due to Zebra’s open interfaces.

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Motorola has created a slideshow that provides and excellent overview of the Motorola MC9500-K rugged mobile computer, it’s features and benefits.

Click on the image below to view the PDF.

Zebra’s announced via Twitter that it will be unveiling the Zebra Xi4 high performance label printer at PACK EXPO in Las Vegas next week.

Little about the Xi4 series has been publicly announced, but it is expected to carry on the high-performance characteristics of Zebra’s rugged, reliable all-metal 110XiIIIPlus, 140XiIIIPlus, 170XiIIIPlus and 220XiIIIPlus printers.

Kudos to Zebra for not naming this update to the XiIIIPlus printer line the XiIV, XiIIII, XiIIIPlusPlus or XiIIIPlus+. 🙂

The Challenge

• Old fashioned manual process of price marks downs.
• How to apply retail price mark downs to only selected clothes items as opposed to whole collections which consisted of several hundred items in store.
• Use of fixed location printers for price mark downs resulted in many financial mistakes being made, not to mention wasted time and resources.
• Use of an external supplier for promotional labels caused delays and errors.

The Solution

• Zebra® QL 320 Plus mobile printers connected to a data terminal using 3rd party software to record stock levels, receipt and delivery of clothing items and price mark down labeling. Continue reading »