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, 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.
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.
Use Zebra's Temperature Monitoring and Sensing devices for vaccines, pharmaceuticals, biologics and any temperature-sensitive products.
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.
Empower the front line with prioritized 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.
Aurora Focus™ runs on Zebra’s fixed industrial scanners and VS20/VS40/VS70 smart cameras and comes ready-made for specific tasks like barcode reading and verification, OCR, and presence/absence vision inspection.
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 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.
Whether you’re designing a product for a customer, practising a hobby or looking to enhance your job prospects, there will always be gaps in your knowledge, topics you don’t understand or skills you can’t yet master. I’d like to share an approach to solution finding that I have developed, partly through observing my 11-year-old son, to tackle these personal and business challenges. The approach is based on recognising that we all have impairments or “disabilities” (visible or not) and that these are key to improving a given situation. By overcoming these impairments first, the overall solution is likely to be better, more innovative and maybe even a game-changer.
Addressing your impairments first demands a new way of thinking from the traditional problem-solving strategies with which you’re probably most familiar. I have a very personal example to bring this theory to life, thanks to my son Fintan. Fintan is blind. He wasn’t blind from birth so he has had to adapt the way he lives and learns in order to continue enjoying the things he loves, such as bike riding, martial arts, attending mainstream school with his friends and generally being a typical 11-year-old boy. He is fascinating and inspiring.
Fintan is also a great piano player. You may well be wondering how a visually-impaired student learns the piano without relying on his or her sight. But, by using a strategy that embraced Fintan’s impairment, the solution surfaced. Fintan’s tutor taught him the black keys/notes before mastering the white keys. Knowing the position of the black keys helped Fintan navigate the whole range of notes and keys, so much so that he is now ahead of other children his age learning the traditional way. We can take a lot from this. What initially held Fintan back has propelled him forward, and the adaptations that work for Fintan can also work for a much wider circle of students, whether visually impaired or not. This could become a new, or certainly alternative, way to learn the piano with a high success rate.
As individuals, we can all recognise and reflect upon our own small impairments, which may well be temporary or not visible to others. Thinking about how to minimise the impact of an impairment will result in a solution that is potentially better than what you were aiming for to begin with. For example, when writing a CV (resumé), you are likely to be planning to move on from your current job. But listing your skills and knowledge serves only to describe your current role. How do you communicate your experience in a way that will make you the candidate you need to be in order to secure a promotion, more responsibility or more rewarding career? By first thinking about where you want to be, you will identify what’s missing from your CV – the things you can’t yet do or the experience you need to gain. Once you have identified these, you can make a plan of action to achieve them, eventually becoming that coveted candidate with improved prospects (and a better resumé).
My team and I champion “accessible-first” design or “designing for disability” which we developed based on this approach. Part of our work is to identify potential end-user impairments or situational disability (such as compromised hearing or bulky clothing) when using various mobile computer, printer, or scanner devices. We consider every potential use environment, from harsh industrial and field service situations to retail and healthcare settings. We then optimise products at the initial design stage to address those possible impairments rather than making modifications at the end, which would be time-consuming and costly. This approach actually provides an all-round improved user experience.
Whether you are trying to develop a new technology, improve at a sport or even help with your child’s homework, it’s instinctive to tackle the easy gains first (what you can do). But this means that you’re leaving the root of the problem untouched (what you can't do). Moving forward, I challenge you to try this “impairment-centric” approach from the start. The learning that you will go through will make you a more experienced individual/team, and the end solution could be more innovative and empowering than what you thought was possible.
###
Editor’s Note: James’ TED Talk on situational disability is a must see! You can watch it here. And, if you weren’t able to attend TED2019 this week in Vancouver, you can get a download of the sessions online.
As Zebra’s Global Director of User Experience', James helps Zebra and its customers understand the impact that technology has on their business and how technology can and should be leveraged to gain strategic advantage for the future. With the pace of technological change, this role is more important now than ever before.
James has worked at Zebra Technologies for over 18 years [through various acquisitions; Symbol, Motorola and now Zebra]. He started his career with the company as a software developer producing custom solutions for the EMEA market and then went on to create the first ever industrial browser, PocketBrowser including defining the industrial extensions to HTML (EMML) that would be used in all industrial browsers in the enterprise space.
As EMEA CTO James acts as the technology lead in the region representing how industries operate and the needs of the region’s users within the technology office to ensure that products and innovations from Zebra are designed and built with a global voice in mind. James also heads up the global User Experience Design team as part of the Innovation & Design group. The UX team is responsible for defining all aspects of experience within Zebra’s solutions ensuring that productivity and accuracy are always the top priority, differentiating the solutions from consumer applications.
Are you a Zebra Developer? Find more technical discussions on our Developer Portal blog.
Looking for more expert insights? Visit the Zebra Story Hub for more interviews, news, and industry trend analysis.
Use the below link to search all of our blog posts.
Legal Terms of Use Privacy Policy Supply Chain Transparency
ZEBRA and the stylized Zebra head are trademarks of Zebra Technologies Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. ©2024 Zebra Technologies Corp. and/or its affiliates.