CEWE Speeds Up Production with Industrial Scanners
CEWE markets a broad range of high-quality photo products. It needed a reliable industrial scanning solution to ensure customers could upload their photos and create photo books without compromising their privacy.
Zebra Success Story: CEWE
Overview: Manufacturing Challenge
CEWE needed a high-speed application and scanner to read up to 22,000 barcodes every hour as an extra layer of security to ensure the correct pages are allocated to each photo book.
Benefits / Outcomes
- Fast, seamless development and deployment of an effective barcode scanning solution, which can be rolled out to other photo book production lines
- The FS40 Fixed Industrial Scanner delivers reliable, automatic, high-speed scanning of up to 22,000 barcodes every hour
- The solution is ensuring the correct pages have been allocated to the right book, which is important for customer service and data protection
About CEWE
Founded in 1961, CEWE Stiftung & Co. KGaA is a German photographic processing company headquartered in Oldenburg, with various production sites across Germany, as well as locations in five other European countries, including the UK. CEWE markets a broad range of high-quality photo products, such as its award-winning photo books, framed prints, calendars and a variety of photo gifts through its high-street photo kiosks, website and app. When customers want to create private photo books, they upload their photos and CEWE prints and delivers their unique photo books.
The Challenge
However, data protection and the personalised nature of these special books does engender an added responsibility to have absolutely fail-safe processes in place to ensure the correct pages appear in the correct book. Therefore, CEWE decided to install an additional highspeed verification scanning application during the production process on its photo book machine at its plant at Germering, near Munich. CSG proposed Zebra’s FS40 Fixed Industrial Scanner.
Christoph Schmidl, Managing Director at CSG, comments on CSG’s long-term collaboration with Zebra: “We’re a family business, so we have the flexibility to work with partners whose solutions are the best long-term solutions for our customers. And we pride ourselves on fast turnarounds and on providing excellent support. Traditionally, working with Zebra, we’ve concentrated on mobile computing and printing projects. However, we’ve recently also become a beta tester for Zebra’s fixed industrial scanners and consequently have come to play our own small role in product recommendation – in terms of functionality and accessories, for example. We have also come to really appreciate the Zebra fixed industrial scanners’ performance, reliability and flexibility, which is why we were happy to recommend the Zebra FS40 for this pilot. It’s a complex, high-speed application, so we knew we needed best-in-class technology to support it.”
CSG is a long-term partner and solutions provider and we trust in its expertise and support. Its team has previously deployed handheld scanners, as well as Zebra mobile computers and printers, at our premises, so we already knew and trusted the Zebra brand. And CSG recommended Zebra for this project as we had a very specific need for a best-in-class high-speed fixed scanner and application for our photo book machine. We haven’t been disappointed. The deployment has gone very smoothly and the solution is providing an extra layer of security to ensure the right pages feature in the correct photo books. We, at Germering, are the first to install this – it’s effectively a pilot project. But, in view of the success, I am sure there will be other possible implementations.
The Solution
Being the first time Zebra and CSG have collaborated on a fixed industrial scanner project, the two companies worked hand in hand to ensure full process knowledge sharing and a successful implementation from cased cabling to application development. At the time of deployment, the Zebra Aurora software made it easy to configure and deploy the scanner’s autonomous smart camera as it has all the intelligence needed on-board.
The Zebra Difference: Outcome and Benefits
High-Speed Application for Up to 22,000 Perfect Barcode Scans Every Hour
CEWE delivers circa 60,000 orders every day. At its Germering site, 11,000 sheets run through the high-gloss photo book machine every hour, and there are two barcodes on each page, to mark the start and end of the page. The scanner sends the captured barcode data via serial interface to CEWE’s system as an extra check that the right pages are being organised into the correct photo book.
As Daniel Pergelt, Head of Department Operational IT at CEWE, explains: “This application is all about reading reliability and speed. The FS40 has proved its capability to deliver 100% accurate first-time, everytime data capture, even at the high speeds of our production line.”
Flexible Application with Huge Potential
Due to the success and feedback on this project, it is hoped the solution will be rolled out to further CEWE production sites. However, the solution is also highly transferable to conveyor belts in the logistics and wider manufacturing sectors.
Schmidl summarises: “We will continue to recommend the most suitable products to our customers, but I can certainly see the benefits and future growing potential of Zebra fixed industrial scanners and associated software.”
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