Honeywell (NYSE: HON) has announced that its Vocollect A700 Solution achieved a major market milestone by becoming the brand’s top-selling voice solution for new customers. The A700 Solution is part of the company’s portfolio of industry-leading voice solutions for mobile workers, helping customers across various industries – including automotive, wholesale distribution, clothing and apparel, logistics and pharmaceutical – save more than $20 billion annually.
“Our success globally is measured by our ability to provide quantifiable business value to help customers address changing business requirements with the industry’s most agile voice solutions,” said Ron Kubera, vice president and general manager, Vocollect Solutions for Honeywell Scanning & Mobility. “Honeywell has a commitment to continuously innovate and the Vocollect A700 Solution has helped customers further reduce operational costs, increase employee productivity and enhance the overall worker experience by combining our SRX2 wireless headsets with our Blue Streak™ speech recognition software, now with SoundSense™ capabilities.”
The Camuto Group, a global industry leader renowned for its prominent women’s lifestyle brands that include the Vince Camuto, VC Signature Vince Camuto, Jessica Simpson, BCBG Maxazria and Lucky Brand labels, selected and successfully implemented the Vocollect A700 Solution.
“With the rapid growth of our successful e-commerce business, we needed to streamline operations to efficiently leverage our current distribution center to fulfill all wholesale, retail and e-commerce orders,” said Jim Henshey, director of corporate distribution for Camuto Group. “To meet our specific business requirements, we selected the Vocollect A700 Solution. Its flexibility and integrated voice and scanning capabilities have enabled us to design more flexible distribution processes that have maximized productivity and increased accuracy, while providing the highest level of customer service.”
The Vocollect A700 Solution also opens new opportunities in innovation for customers striving to keep up with growth and take their distribution and logistics processes to higher levels of excellence. Home Hardware Stores Limited – Canada’s largest independent hardware, lumber, building materials and furniture retailer – recently expanded its investment in state-of-the-art systems to support its growing distribution center (DC) needs, in its Eastern Canada DC where shipments have increased by 35 percent over the last number of years.
“We are always looking for ways to improve and provide superior customer service,” said John Dyksterhuis, vice president of distribution at Home Hardware. “As part of our DC expansion efforts, we wanted state-of-the-art systems and processes. We selected the Vocollect A700 Solution to help us increase throughput and to provide faster onboarding for our workers, especially during peak and seasonal times. The Vocollect A700 Solution also offers flexibility with multi-language support, including English and French.”
The Vocollect A700 Solution has received positive feedback for its openness and seamless integrated development environment (IDE), VoiceArtisan™. The VoiceArtisan software platform enables customers and partners to expand the capabilities of their Vocollect solution using Rapid Application Development (RAD) techniques, while VoiceCatalyst™ software provides flexible connectivity to devices, servers and information beyond the capabilities of a traditional voice solution. The A700 Solution also enables certified partners and trained customer IT teams to quickly design, code, deploy and maintain customer-defined solutions and to address unique business requirements beyond existing out-of-the-box software functionality.
After implementing Vocollect in 2008, HI Giörtz Sönner, a leading grocery supplier in Norway and part of the Norgesgruppen Group, rapidly saw a productivity increase of 20 percent. Most recently, after upgrading to the Vocollect A700 Solution, HI Giörtz Sönner has seen its total productivity increase effectively an additional 25 percent compared to their previous Vocollect technology investment.
“At HI Giörtz Sönner, we innovate so we can deliver a better service to our customers,” said Vebjörn Annö, projects director, HI Giörtz Sönner. “Since upgrading to the newest Vocollect A700 Solution, we are training new staff up to ten minutes faster than before and are seeing significant improvement in worker productivity. In addition, the accelerated response time between the Vocollect A700 Solution and our warehouse management system helps our workers complete orders faster and more accurately. Most of our customers tell us they no longer need to check deliveries, because they know they are getting accurate orders every time.”
Voiteq-Teknix, one of the largest and most experienced voice providers in Europe, has more than 10 years of proven expertise in delivering solutions based upon Vocollect voice technology.
“The Vocollect A700 Solution has been well-received by our European customers. The ability to seamlessly utilize voice and scanning with a single device designed specifically to enhance the ergonomic worker experience has been a tremendous value-add for our customers,” said Rémy Meulins, managing director, France at Voiteq-Teknix. “Voiteq-Teknix is positively positioned to offer our customers the market leading voice solution that provides the desired flexibility to support business challenges created by the world of e-commerce and omni-channel order fulfillment. It’s reassuring to work with a partner like Honeywell who has the financial strength and commitment to innovation that ultimately will help us continue to expand our business.”
With support from WMS, material handling partners and ERP solutions industry leaders, Honeywell’s Vocollect solution provides joint customers with real-time voice interfaces to reduce operating costs and maximize the unique functionality available within their individual WMS, ERP and material handling solutions. The Vocollect A700 also continues to fully enable the industry’s widest number of mobile worker devices, including Honeywell, Intermec, Motorola and Psion mobile computers. It further expands that availability by adding enablement on the Honeywell CN70, as well as Motorola Solutions’ MC9190, MC3190 and WT41N0 devices.
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