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.
Technology is a key enabler in helping the Public Sector provide their frontline and back office workers automate business process and assets with a digital voice.
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 post was contributed by Sarah Archer, Digital Marketing Coordinator at RF-SMART, a Zebra registered reseller partner.
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Today’s manufacturers are looking for greater visibility into their operations to increase efficiencies. Operations managers need the ability to execute production plans and schedules with optimum results, while planning for the unexpected. In the event that equipment goes down or quality issues arise, manufacturers must react, re-plan and reprioritize in real time. Additionally, to stay competitive and profitable, they must maximize production efficiencies while adhering to all safety protocols. That’s where technology comes in.
Nearly every one of manufacturers’ goals – whether focused on mitigating issues or introducing new efficiencies – requires a greater level of operational visibility than what’s found in most production environments today. Manufacturers are craving better connectivity between assets, materials and people within the four walls. Traditionally, there has been a separation between enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and operations technology. That must now change. As such, manufacturers are turning to new technology, such as cloud-connected RFID solutions and sensors as well as mobile handheld computers and scanners.
To achieve true visibility, though, manufacturers must also consider the traceability of their products throughout the entire supply chain. Traceability is imperative to maintaining product safety lessening the impact of recalls, should they occur – especially for those who manufacture perishables such as food or pharmaceuticals.
If you’re a discrete manufacturer, you might also know this to be true. You want to be able to confirm that the right part got into its final assembly and have a record of the exact part SKU or instance in case there is a later issue. Track and trace technology solutions, such as barcode scanners and RFID, enable you to have much better control over quality, recall and warranty management and many other circumstances.
Though barcode scanners, RFID readers, sensors and mobile computing technologies are necessary to capture the data that informs decisions and actions, printing solutions are actually the key to achieving manufacturers’ visibility and traceability goals. If a label or tag is inaccurate or unreadable, then the other technologies become a moot point.
At the same time, choosing the correct printer and supplies for your manufacturing environment can take your facility to the next level. Thermal printing solutions, such as the ones that Zebra offers, have been around for quite some time. But believe it or not, some manufacturing customers still use other types of printing methods such as laser or ink jet printing to produce labels or product tags. If you compare these three types of printing technologies, you’ll see that thermal printing technologies offer a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and a higher total benefits of ownership (TBO) value than ink jet or laser printing technologies, particularly in manufacturing environments.
In addition, thermal printing hardware tends to be more reliable and durable because it is purpose-built for industrial and enterprise use cases. The barcode, label, or document that's being printed by thermal printers will also be of a much higher quality and last longer – assuming you’re using the right printhead, ribbon, inlay and supplies for both your printer and your labeling application.
Another consideration when you're selecting a printer is the physical accessibility of the hardware itself. Gone are the days when workers have no choice but to walk back and forth to a stationary printer. Though you may still need a stationary printer for some applications, it is quite possible that your labeling workflows can just as easily be executed using mobile printers that can be mounted to a forklift or worn on the hip. There are even rugged RFID mobile printers available now. So, instead of trekking across the shop floor to print out a stack of labels or RFID tags on a stationary printer, workers can take the printer with them wherever they go without losing printing capabilities.
Of course, there are instances in which a stationary printer is still best. But that doesn’t mean that workers have to necessarily move from their stations to use it. Many manufacturers are choosing to embed a printer within their manufacturing lines, and that printer becomes a mission-critical piece of production. However, if that printer goes down or begins to produce low-quality or inaccurate labels, your whole manufacturing line could go down. For this reason, you need to have a printing solution that is extremely reliable and durable – and right for your unique labeling applications.
In fact, I recently sat down with Zebra’s Director of Supply Chain Solutions, Mark Wheeler, as well as Marty Johnson, Zebra’s Regional Printer Portfolio Manager, to talk in detail about the manufacturing trends that industry leaders are seeing, as well as best practices for choosing and maintaining printers.
BONUS!
If you’re hankering for some amazing deep-dish pizza, Mark and Marty spill the beans on two fan-favorite places that will actually overnight you a pie, no matter where you are in the U.S. (You’re welcome.)
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Sarah Archer is the Digital Marketing Coordinator at RF-SMART, where she hosts the Taking Inventory Podcast. RF-SMART is a mobile barcoding solution that improves accuracy, productivity and profitability for over 1,300 cloud customers worldwide.
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