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 energise 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, optimise 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.
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 organisation to better manage and optimise 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 customise 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 labour costs low, your talent happy and your organisation 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 prioritised 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, maximising IT resources and minimising 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.
The Zebra Aurora suite of machine vision software enables users to solve their track-and-trace, vision inspection and industrial automation 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.
Aurora Vision Studio, an image processing software for machine & computer vision engineers, allows quick creation, integration & monitoring of powerful OEM vision applications.
Adding innovative tech is critical to your success, but it can be complex and disruptive. Professional Services help you accelerate adoption, and maximise 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.
This blog post was contributed by Robin Kallsen, Content Specialist, Omron Automation, a Zebra original equipment manufacturer (OEM) integrator that provides scanning and print verification technologies to a broad set of industries, including healthcare and manufacturing.
What drives the requirement for accurate, high-quality labels? With so much hanging in the balance for manufacturers and retailers competing on a global scale, there’s no good reason to ignore the need for label quality. Mislabeled packaging could have consequences that range from wasted product to (potentially severe) consumer health issues. For example:
And these are just a few of the many reasons why it’s critical to ensure the accuracy and legibility of product and packaging labels. Today, I want to point out the four things that most often prompt organizations to reevaluate their labeling strategies and ultimately invest in label verification technology solutions:
1. General product traceability
Product traceability, in a general sense, is essential for consumer safety, regulatory compliance and overall quality perception. If there’s a problem with a product, traceability allows the consumer, retailer or another entity to quickly locate and segregate defective products. This is especially beneficial in the event of a recall and to ensure compliance with regulatory mandates, such as those that improve visibility into the location and use of medical equipment, raw materials and more.
In fact, companies paid up to $24 billion USD in recalls in 2018 for reasons including misprinted labels, and just last year a major auto manufacturer was fined $20 million for failing to adhere to recall procedures mandated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), a government body. The Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) has even defined common transport label standards to facilitate the easy and compliant movement of goods and the exchange of data among all members of the supply chain.
2. Life sciences industry regulations
In most life science-related industries, and particularly in the medical device and pharmaceutical industries, there are regulatory requirements requiring that labels are legible, show the correct content, and contain barcodes of a minimum quality.
Noncompliance with respect to labeling can lead to warning letters from regulatory bodies and recalls. In fact, label issues have historically been one of the top three causes of recalls in the pharmaceutical industry. According to the Sedgwick Brand Protection Recall Index, there was a 22% increase in medical device recalls from 2019 to 2020.
Large retailers are also working to ensure quality compliance for pharmaceutical products. Amazon, for example, has begun imposing Food and Drug Administration (FDA) labeling requirements on firms selling supplements on its U.S. site. If a seller can’t demonstrate this compliance, the product will be removed. And the European Union (EU) has enacted strict traceability standards for pharmaceutical drug manufacturers to help mitigate the risk of counterfeit items entering the supply chain.
3. Customer-driven labeling specifications
Many manufacturers of higher value or higher risk items rely on proprietary, serialized label content to help mitigate the risk of counterfeit products entering the supply chain. Label authenticity can be controlled and verified by means of label inspection and serialization.
As an example, the recent report of counterfeit N95 masks entering the supply chain highlights the need for anti-counterfeiting strategies. Plus, compliance with GS1 labeling standards has been a key investment driver for verification infrastructure in regards to the serialization of retail merchandise and healthcare products.
4. Safety and brand protection
Most retailers require their suppliers to conform to certain specifications that define label content and printing quality. If retailers cannot receive product due to a poor-quality barcode or incorrect information within the barcode, they often return the product and issue a financial penalty to the supplier.
For example, one manufacturer of brooms and mops incurred costs in excess of $100,000 due to the use of an incorrect barcode type on the product packaging. This issue led to the manufacturer adopting a printer-integrated label inspection system to avoid such errors in the future.
Printer-integrated label inspection systems are a highly effective way to prevent labeling errors and ensure that only high-quality barcodes make it onto final packaging. These systems are capable of analyzing 100% of all labels produced in a way that doesn’t slow down production. If an error is discovered, the system can be programmed to stop all printing immediately. (One such system that is integrated into the Zebra ZT600 series thermal printers is the Omron V275 barcode verification and print quality inspection system.)
In the long run, automated label inspection can dramatically increase a company’s competitive advantage by minimizing the likelihood of hefty fines or dissatisfaction among retailers and consumers.
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