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.
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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.
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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.
Struggling to Manage CPG Supply Chain Variability? This is What You’re Probably Missing
In years to come, the extreme product shortages of the pandemic may seem like just another blip in the history of marketplace behavior. Yet, they leave behind a permanent realization that near-term events can rapidly cause consumer demand to explode or supply to be interrupted. What was once considered a possibility is now a very real probability. Furthermore, these events seem to be happening more frequently than ever before, and often defying market logic. Case in point – the recent unbowed demand for lumber despite prices that were more than four times the norm.
In a survey of 150 manufacturing executives, law firm Foley & Lardner found that 70% agreed that their companies will, as a result of the pandemic, lessen their focus on sourcing from the lowest-cost supplier in favor of higher supply chain resiliency, and only 7% are not undertaking contingency planning efforts to prepare for future disruptions.
However, major modifications to supply chain inter-dependencies and production output take time to engineer. Unless management feels that the gap will be of longer duration, companies are unlikely to immediately invest millions in building new manufacturing facilities or make radical supply chain changes. In the end, the near-term job of managing inventory through times of tight supply falls to the planners and warehouse managers in charge of allocation and order fulfillment.
In the article, “Who Gets What When Supply Chains Are Disrupted?”, Yossi Sheffi, the Elisha Gray II Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT, makes the point that these fulfillment decisions must be guided by an explicit corporate strategy that considers post-shortage objectives and impact. Choice of tactics can have different timeframe and marketplace repercussions. For example, manufacturers deciding to respond on a first-come first serve basis during a shortage, treating everyone equally to avoid the appearance of favoritism, can run into significant challenges if customers try to game the system by artificially inflating their orders.
In addition, increasing on time, in full (OTIF) penalties from big-box retailers are pushing the responsibility for fixing those supply shortages back onto the manufacturer, making unintended shortfalls a very costly mistake. Consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers, juggling different revenue strategies across their major retailer customers and direct-to-consumer (DTC) channels, have worked hard to establish preferred relationships to maximize consumer retention and minimize OTIF penalties. These strategic priorities can be undone if they are not reflected at the end of the supply chain as well as the beginning.
Intelligent Order Promising (IOP), coupled with highly accurate short-term demand sensing, ensures that top-down strategy is captured in bottom-up execution. Advantages of this easy-to-deploy capability to supply chain planning and execution include:
maintenance of allocations or logical pools of supply at different levels of the customer hierarchy to counterbalance first come, first served fulfillment in the absence of more direction when unexpected shortages occur,
assignment of limited supply to orders based on currently available and incoming supply, allocated amounts and order priorities, and
determination of those priorities by a set of business rules aligned with strategically determined segments, based on rigorous analysis. These rules are established from the beginning but can be easily refreshed as business conditions evolve.
Why does IOP differ from Available to Promise (ATP) bolt-on functionality in an ERP system? ERP-based ATP and Order Promising systems have limited capability and typically require 3-4 months to recalibrate – this is no longer the timeframe in which business is expected to respond. IOP, on the other hand, enables a streamlined handling of order fulfillment adjustments for complex supply chain situations. IOP also builds a direct bridge between strategic segments, business goals, and day-to-day execution and can adapt immediately when those strategic goals change.
By automating the process of supply reservation and tie-breaking across channels, accounts and orders, IOP eliminates time-consuming, manual, and sometimes irrational order quantity manipulation for both the CPG company and its retail partners. It also leads to low- to no-touch planning at the warehouse by letting the system do the heavy lifting.
In the end, there is an upside to the supply interruption of the past few years. Leading CPG manufacturers are learning from these disruptions and implementing technologies that better prepare them for a world of greater variability and tighter constraints. IOP is the answer for those who wish to face the next marketplace surprise with the confidence that it can be absorbed without undue business impact.
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Editor’s Note:
If you’d like to learn more about how you can leverage IOP or about the AI technology underpinning IOP, start here.
Vinay Chaturvedi
Vinay Chaturvedi manages the retail replenishment and supply chain products at antuit.ai.
Prior to joining antuit.ai, Vinay worked for over fifteen years with the SAS institute in retail and supply chain product management. During that time, he helped develop SAS’ Demand-Driven Planning and Optimization suite of products.
Vinay has hands-on experience with manufacturing, automation, production planning, and supply chain management in automotive and consumer electronics industries. At antuit.ai, he has helped develop expertise in Demand Planning, Direct Store Delivery Order management, CPG Order Promising, and Retail Replenishment.
An ardent customer advocate, he is a recognized expert in Demand Planning and Replenishment Optimization.
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