Re-thinking a Market-leading Product
When it comes time to re-design the most successful rugged mobile computer in your portfolio; a product that still dominates its product category a decade after initial release, it’s easy to think in terms of incremental improvements. In other words, don’t mess with success! So we could have just made it a little smaller, a little lighter and a little faster — but we didn’t! One of our customers put it best: “It’s nice that you are making smaller devices… but here’s what I’m interested in hearing about: where is my next big boost in productivity going to come from?”
So we shifted our innovation focus from product improvements to addressing our customer’s warehouse needs. We went back to our customers to understand their fundamental business challenges. They manage warehouse inventory and with e-commerce growing exponentially their businesses were under tremendous pressure to increase operational efficiency.
We conducted extensive on-site interviews and observational research and identified a number of opportunities to improve productivity. One of the key discoveries was that over time accuracy had become more important. It used to be that distribution centers would ship pallet loads of product to stores to replenish shelf stock. If they happened to ship too much product it wasn’t a big problem. The extra product could always be stored in the back of the store until needed.
However, e-commerce demanded that every shipment had to be correct because it was going directly to the consumer. As a consequence, e-commerce fulfillment centers were instructing their pickers to check the screen after every scan to be sure the data captured is correct. This resulted in a continuous back and forth motion between aiming the scanner and checking the screen. Every product pick required three scans; the product, shelf location, and the picking tote and each of those three scans needed to be checked. Even though the scan to screen motion only took a couple of seconds it added up across hundreds of scans for every picker resulting in a significant amount of time across the fulfillment center.
This discovery among others led to a complete re-configuration of the product design and interface creating an entirely different user experience. Through continuous design iterations and human factors testing we proved out our theory and delivered on the promise of double-digit productivity improvement. Unheard of in a product category that has seen only marginal advances in more than two decades.
Out of this effort came our newly launched Zebra TC8000. It completely breaks the mold for rugged mobile computers. It is intuitive and efficient to use, easy to hold and carry, adaptable for multiple use-cases and by the way it is significantly smaller, 33% lighter and a lot faster.
https://www.zebra.com/us/en/products/mobile-computers/handheld/tc8000.html
