MHW Magazine News and stories from the Materials Handling Industry
VITRONIC has been awarded a multi-million dollar contract to automate the manual processing of flats and small parcels from a large parcel and post customer.
Under the terms of the contract, VITRONIC Machine Vision Ltd. will provide over 1,000 VICAMsnap! camera units to be deployed in early 2013 for the customer’s facilities throughout the United States. The VITRONIC camera systems will provide scanning and barcode decoding for all customer specific linear and 2-dimensional codes (PostNet™, Planet Code®, Datamatrix & PDF-417 and Intelligent Mail® Barcodes), provide image capture and archiving routines, and allow the customer to provide additional tracking capabilities throughout their network.
The VITRONIC VICAMsnap! solution replaces a previous multi-step process and will allow faster manual sorting and throughput efficiency along with enhancing the customer experience.
"Our solution allows our customers to take advantage of the latest innovative technology in the market today," says Michael Schindler, VITRONIC Machine Vision Limited’s president of North American operations. "Our product was chosen after extensive testing and we are proud that we were awarded this competitive contract to assist our customer in streamlining their operations to recover and protect its revenue. There is no product like the VICAMsnap! on the market today and this program allows us to build on to other successful programs with this customer and future customers."
VITRONIC’s VICAMsnap! is a compact, lightweight camera based solution that packs performance into a robust design. It is equipped with white illumination that allows for the reading and decoding of colored barcodes and provides more effective reading of damaged or poorly printed barcodes on colored backgrounds. VICAMsnap! provides a 12×10 inch width of field and 16 inch depth of field, allowing operators to immediately capture all 1D and 2D barcodes present on parcels, flats and boxes.
A target illumination on the package allows the operator to quickly find the scan zone and process the items being scanned. VICAMsnap! provides immediate feedback to the operator through audible tones and configurable voice commands. It features visual red and green go/no go LED flash indicators directly on the items being scanned, allowing the operator to process the item even in noisy industrial environments. The system is equipped with a powerful processing unit that provides more than just barcode reading; it allows image capture/archiving and complex processing routines completed in real time. Images can be compressed, binarized, pre-processed for OCR and transmitted via Gigabit Ethernet to a host server for further processing or offline archiving purposes.
The VICAMsnap! camera is an advanced information and image acquisition system designed for manual and automated processing in the material handling, warehousing, parcel/post, distribution and manufacturing industries.
