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 mobile computing, scanning, and printing solutions connect each operational area in your warehouse to give you the agility to realize transformational gains.
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 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.
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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.
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Drive down costs while driving up employee, security, and network performance with software designed to enhance Zebra's wireless infrastructure and mobile solutions.
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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.
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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.
We can’t live without our mobile devices and your employees can’t work without them. The feedback received during Zebra’s 2020 Shopper Vision Study confirmed that.
Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of store associates believe that shoppers can have a better experience in stores when they – the associates – can use the latest technology to assist them, and the majority of shoppers (58 percent) agree.
Whether helping customers checkout, manning the fitting rooms or managing stock, arming store associates with a host of enterprise-grade mobile technologies that are designed to keep customers and, frankly, associates happy is the key to generating sales, which keeps your shareholders happy. For example:
That being said, you may not enjoy the same efficiencies and outcomes if you opt for consumer-grade devices or even some enterprise-grade devices that were originally intended for other use cases.
Think about it this way: Would you use a mass-marketed chainsaw to cut down a redwood? A push mower to landscape an entire park? Or a pickup instead of a semi-trailer truck to haul cargo across the country? Of course not. You wouldn’t attempt such feats no matter how much money you might save upfront on the equipment. Chances are that even if those tools performed at their peak capacity, they would still fall well short of providing the performance and reliability you need to complete the tasks ahead of you. It would also require a much greater time and resource commitment than if you were to just invest in the more powerful “industrial” versions of the equipment that’s needed and proven to get the job done right.
The same is true of the many mobile technology options available to retailers.
Retrofitting tablets and smartphones with rugged cases, mobile credit card readers and camera-based barcode scanning applications may work in some situations, but they still leave you and your associates vulnerable to a host of issues that can lead you to lose sales in the short term and customers in the longer term. Plus, as Darren Koffer thoroughly explained in his most recent blog post, the Android mobile devices you give your warehouse workers may not be the devices for your front-line workers and vice versa. You really need to think about the specific work environment, workflow and worker when building your retail mobility solution ecosystem.
Eighty-five (85) percent of retail executives surveyed for Zebra’s 2020 Shopper Study believe that shoppers have a better experience in stores where associates use the latest technology to assist them. Many associates agreed, saying that mobile devices and other technology tools help them quickly find correct prices and products and answer questions, which saves customers time. They are able to order out-of-stock items for customers from the middle of the store floor; suggest complementary products; provide coupons or discounts and even help with the returns and exchange process among many other things – using just their company-issued mobile device.
Yet, these benefits are only realized by store associates and shoppers when the mobile technology works as it should: when it can quickly scan the barcode on the shelf or item, sync with back-end systems to retrieve real-time inventory levels and process returns or receive guidance from prescriptive analytics solutions about the “next best action” that should be taken to ensure shelves are stocked and items are in the right place.
At a more fundamental level, retailers must ensure that the mobile devices they give their workers will reliably power on – and stay on – all shift (or all day) long. That means that the devices must be able to work despite being dropped onto hard concrete floors, tossed into restocking carts, bumped while on workers’ belts or used in freezers. It also means that the device must consistently connect to the Wi-Fi, quickly process associate requests (shoppers can be impatient) and be remotely configurable to maintain proper security protections. It also helps when the devices’ batteries are hot swappable, since it can be difficult to take even a single device out of service for a prolonged recharging period. Store associates depend on their devices all shift long, and sharing devices means that someone is always without one.
That is why many retailers are now finding enterprise-grade mobility solutions to be better suited for their business environments and are moving away from consumer-grade options.
Office Depot is one of them.
Its customers, which are mostly businesses, demand fast and flexible item purchase and pickup options – something that the retailers’ previous mobile devices just weren’t capable of delivering. Store associates found it difficult to assist customers on the store floor and the devices weren’t capable of elevating Office Depot’s supply chain operations to “on demand” efficiency levels. Picking buy online, pickup in store (BOPIS) and ship from store orders was very challenging due to the lack of associate collaboration tools, as was confirming the status of orders. Both customers and the retailer were often left frustrated.
So, Office Depot decided to blaze a new path forward; it invested in a new, customer-centric enterprise-grade Android mobility solution. (Though, as you can see in the below video, that solution included the adoption of a few different device models. Office Depot understands that different workers need different mobile computing and scanning capabilities to effectively do their jobs.)
My advice? Follow its lead.
I’m not saying that you must use the exact same handheld mobile computers in the exact same way, or that ring scanners are best for your workers. But, if you want to gain an operational edge in a highly evolving and extremely competitive retail environment, you should ensure that you’re only giving your workers enterprise-grade rugged devices.
I’ll explain the four very specific reasons why in my next blog post. Stay tuned in here on Your Edge, or subscribe to the bi-weekly blog roundup email to ensure you don’t miss it.
Anees Haidri is currently the Director of Vertical Strategy for Retail where he is responsible for positioning growth opportunities and providing thought leadership within retail for Zebra Technologies. He has more than 15 of experience within the retail industry and has deployed multiple, large scale edge device solutions for a Fortune 30 retailer. He also has over 20 years of experience in building customer focused mobility solutions within a variety of industries.
Previously, Mr. Haidri served as a Sr. Director of Technology at The Home Depot, where he managed high performing teams aimed at building customer-focused technology solutions for stores & merchandising.
He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Rutgers University.
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