Zebra's Industry Solutions can give your business a competitive advantage by connecting people, assets and data to help you make better decisions.
Scale and energize your retail strategy with a digital backbone that unifies your team, informs priorities and drives results with Zebra's retail technology solutions.
Zebra's healthcare technology solutions provide patient identity management, mobile health devices, and business intelligence data to improve efficiency.
Zebra’s manufacturing technology solutions enable manufacturers to become more agile, optimize plant floor performance and embrace market changes.
Zebra's market-leading solutions and products improve customer satisfaction with a lower cost per interaction by keeping service representatives connected with colleagues, customers, management and the tools they use to satisfy customers across the supply chain.
In today's world, the demands on transportation and logistics companies are higher than ever. Dedicated Warehouse, Fleet and Delivery, and Yard and Terminal solutions enable visibility to every aspect of your business and keep operations running flawlessly around the clock.
Zebra's hospitality technology solutions equip your hotel and restaurant staff to deliver superior customer and guest service through inventory tracking and more.
Empower your field workers with purpose-driven mobile technology solutions to help them capture and share critical data in any environment.
Learn how Zebra's public sector technology solutions empower state and local governments to improve efficiency with asset tracking and data capture devices.
Zebra's range of Banking technology solutions enables banks to minimize costs and to increase revenue throughout their branch network. Learn more.
Zebra’s mobile computing, scanning, and printing solutions connect each operational area in your warehouse to give you the agility to realize transformational gains.
Zebra's range of mobile computers equip your workforce with the devices they need from handhelds and tablets to wearables and vehicle-mounted computers.
Zebra's desktop, mobile, industrial, and portable printers for barcode labels, receipts, RFID tags and cards give you smarter ways to track and manage assets.
Zebra's 1D and 2D corded and cordless barcode scanners anticipate any scanning challenge in a variety of environments, whether retail, healthcare, T&L or manufacturing.
Zebra's extensive range of RAIN RFID readers, antennas, and printers give you consistent and accurate tracking.
Choose Zebra's reliable barcode, RFID and card supplies carefully selected to ensure high performance, print quality, durability and readability.
Zebra's location technologies provide real-time tracking for your organization to better manage and optimize your critical assets and create more efficient workflows.
Zebra's rugged tablets and 2-in-1 laptops are thin and lightweight, yet rugged to work wherever you do on familiar and easy-to-use Windows or Android OS.
With Zebra's family of fixed industrial scanners and machine vision technologies, you can tailor your solutions to your environment and applications.
Discover Zebra’s range of accessories from chargers, communication cables to cases to help you customize your mobile device for optimal efficiency.
Zebra's OEM scan engines, imagers, and private label OEM products offer flexible integration and help enhance product development with modern OEM technology.
Zebra's environmental sensors monitor temperature-sensitive products, offering data insights on environmental conditions across industry applications.
Keep labor costs low, your talent happy and your organization compliant. Create an agile operation that can navigate unexpected schedule changes and customer demand to drive sales, satisfy customers and improve your bottom line.
Empower the front line with prioritized task notification and enhanced communication capabilities for easier collaboration and more efficient task execution.
Get full visibility of your inventory and automatically pinpoint leaks across all channels.
Reduce uncertainty when you anticipate market volatility. Predict, plan and stay agile to align inventory with shifting demand.
Drive down costs while driving up employee, security, and network performance with software designed to enhance Zebra's wireless infrastructure and mobile solutions.
Explore Zebra’s printer software to integrate, manage and monitor printers easily, maximizing IT resources and minimizing down time.
Make the most of every stage of your scanning journey from deployment to optimization. Zebra's barcode scanner software lets you keep devices current and adapt them to your business needs for a stronger ROI across the full lifecycle.
RFID development, demonstration and production software and utilities help you build and manage your RFID deployments more efficiently.
RFID development, demonstration and production software and utilities help you build and manage your RFID deployments more efficiently.
Zebra DNA is the industry’s broadest suite of enterprise software that delivers an ideal experience for all during the entire lifetime of every Zebra device.
Advance your digital transformation and execute your strategic plans with the help of the right location and tracking technology.
Boost warehouse and manufacturing operations with Symmetry, an AMR software for fleet management of Autonomous Mobile Robots and streamlined automation workflows.
The Zebra Aurora suite of industrial automation software enables users of all experience levels to solve their track-and-trace and vision inspection needs.
Zebra Aurora Focus brings a new level of simplicity to controlling enterprise-wide manufacturing and logistics automation solutions. With this powerful interface, it’s easy to set up, deploy and run Zebra’s Fixed Industrial Scanners and Machine Vision Smart Cameras, eliminating the need for different tools and reducing training and deployment time.
Aurora Imaging Library™, formerly Matrox Imaging Library, machine-vision software development kit (SDK) has a deep collection of tools for image capture, processing, analysis, annotation, display, and archiving. Code-level customization starts here.
Aurora Design Assistant™, formerly Matrox Design Assistant, integrated development environment (IDE) is a flowchart-based platform for building machine vision applications, with templates to speed up development and bring solutions online quicker.
Designed for experienced programmers proficient in vision applications, Aurora Vision Library provides the same sophisticated functionality as our Aurora Vision Studio software but presented in programming language.
Aimed at machine and computer vision engineers, Aurora Vision Studio software enables users to quickly create, integrate and monitor powerful machine vision applications without the need to write a single line of code.
Adding innovative tech is critical to your success, but it can be complex and disruptive. Professional Services help you accelerate adoption, and maximize productivity without affecting your workflows, business processes and finances.
Zebra's Managed Service delivers worry-free device management to ensure ultimate uptime for your Zebra Mobile Computers and Printers via dedicated experts.
Find ways you can contact Zebra Technologies’ Support, including Email and Chat, ask a technical question or initiate a Repair Request.
Zebra's Circular Economy Program helps you manage today’s challenges and plan for tomorrow with smart solutions that are good for your budget and the environment.
The Zebra Knowledge Center provides learning expertise that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of your environment.
Zebra has a wide variety of courses to train you and your staff, ranging from scheduled sessions to remote offerings as well as custom tailored to your specific needs.
Build your reputation with Zebra's certification offerings. Zebra offers a variety of options that can help you progress your career path forward.
Build your reputation with Zebra's certification offerings. Zebra offers a variety of options that can help you progress your career path forward.
*This post was written by Kevin Ledversis, Sales Director for Newcastle Systems, a registered Zebra ISV.
###
Did you know you are spending up to twice as much on labor on your receiving dock as you should be? Or that the error rates on your receiving labels could be 10 times what they should be? More importantly, did you know that many of your workers are taking far more footsteps in a day than they need to due to excessive trips to the printer? These are problems that many retailers and 3PLs don’t realize that they have.
The good news is that these are problems easily solved with transportable printers – or, should I say, a stationary desktop or full-size industrial label printer that can be made mobile.
While “mobility” has been a mandate for over a decade now, every organization – regardless of industry – can benefit from adopting a “mobile-first mindset” when re-examining their core processes, especially if a label printer is part of the process. Almost any technology device commonly found in the warehouse or on the production floor can “go mobile,” including:
Workstation solutions such as this one allow you to mount any size printer, up to a full-size industrial label printer, along with a laptop, monitor, scanner and more to instantly mobilize workers and workflows that would otherwise be tethered to a stationary desk. Instead of forcing staff to walk back and forth – which results in lost time, lost inventory and more errors overall – a fully-mobile workstation gives them a print-on-demand capability at the point where they’re processing the pallets.
In other words, the common method of placing printers on a dedicated table, plugged into the ethernet, is an overlooked inefficiency that can be easily remedied for those who want to introduce greater speed and efficiency into high-volume, time-sensitive labeling and logistics applications. Even better, mobilizing a desktop or industrial printer on a powered cart can give you an instant return on investment (ROI).
The receiving process is fairly uniform across industries and one of the simplest to measure: by reducing footsteps, you’re automatically speeding up the receiving process.
Consider this: a typical desktop printer prints approximately 1,000 4x6 shipping labels each day. A mid-range industrial printer can typically print 10,000 such labels per day. And a high-performance industrial printer can print shipping labels 24/7. That means that a worker who is able to take a desktop or industrial printer wherever he or she goes can easily process every carton coming off of a 40-foot container. With a laptop, scanner, monitor or other devices mounted on the workstation, troubleshooting, research and other printing tasks are also possible. As the graphic below illustrates, one produce company averaging 18 truckloads received every day saved $22,000 per year in labor just on the receiving dock by deploying a mobile print solution such as the one just described.
Now, you might be wondering if a traditional mobile printer can have a similar impact. Here’s the challenge: most manufacturing facilities, warehouses, distribution centers and even retail locations receive a high volume of pallets and products. That means that a high volume of labels needs to be printed to process each inbound shipment.
While a handheld computer and mobile printer can do the job for low-volume labeling applications, it is likely that associates would have to stop to replenish labels every two to three pallets. Most mobile printers have a relatively small capacity of around 75 labels – nowhere near the volume needed to process most inbound loads.
Related Resource:
Learn more about how Receiving can be transformed in a day with “The Receiving Revolution,” free for download here.
While Receiving tends to be the first application for most users given the immediate productivity gains, mobile printing has measurable benefits in every part of the warehouse.
In fact, our customers quickly get creative in their mobile printing applications as the possibilities become clear:
A partner common to both Zebra and Newcastle Systems combined the mobile power capabilities of Newcastle System’s mobile workstation with an RFID antenna that allows the end-user to walk through the warehouse and complete inventory in just 15 minutes. The telescoping pole mounted on the cart can carry multiple antennae and is raised to ensure coverage to the full height of the racking and both sides of the aisle.
A large importer with facilities across the U.S. and Canada uses mobile-powered carts equipped with dimensional scanners and scales to measure incoming products and identify the appropriate-sized bins for products requiring irradiation (i.e. spices and medical supplies).
These are just two of the many different ways that “mobile printing” solutions can payoff in manufacturing, warehousing, distribution and retail operations.
Industrial printers have superior Wi-Fi connectivity and management capabilities and can include field upgrades such as RFID encoding and cutter/peeler accessories to accommodate specialized labeling applications. With dozens of different mobile workstation configurations possible – each able to combine different sizes of carts, power packages and accessories – you can really make any device-dependent process mobile to help release bottlenecks and accelerate processes.
Plus, outfitting a dedicated cart with all computing and printing tools required by an associate can facilitate greater social distancing and minimize cross-contamination exposures to COVID-19 and other contagions via widely-shared devices at stationary workstations.
As you’re assessing the ways in which a mobilized industrial or desktop printing solution could benefit your business, ask yourself two questions:
If a stationary printer is expected to produce a high volume of labels every day for tasks that are done in various parts of the warehouse, then “transportable printing” will likely provide a large and immediate impact on your productivity, labor costs and error rates.
###
Contact Zebra or Newcastle Systems to learn more about currently-available industrial and desktop “mobile” printing solutions for your labeling applications.
As Sales Director for Newcastle Systems, Kevin Ledversis helps customers identify where and how process improvements can be made in warehouse operations. Mr. Ledversis has over 20 years of experience within the Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC) industry. Prior to joining Newcastle Systems, he worked in sales for Weber Labeling Solutions, Intermec and Printronix where he developed solutions for complex labeling applications in a variety of verticals such as distribution, manufacturing, healthcare and retail. Mr. Ledversis earned his MBA degree from University of Hartford and a bachelor’s degree from Bryant University.
Are you a Zebra Developer? Find more technical discussions on our Developer Portal blog.
Looking for more expert insights? Visit the Zebra Story Hub for more interviews, news, and industry trend analysis.
Use the below link to search all of our blog posts.
Legal Terms of Use Privacy Policy Supply Chain Transparency
ZEBRA and the stylized Zebra head are trademarks of Zebra Technologies Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. ©2024 Zebra Technologies Corp. and/or its affiliates.