Partner Blog
by: Barry J. Ewell / Honeywell
In these challenging times, it’s a balancing act to drive profitable growth and streamline existing processes to further reduce costs and make an efficient business run even better. Honeywell can help you identify additional ways to reduce your operating costs, while supporting increased workforce productivity and greater worker accuracy.
Honeywell is a leading provider of innovative voice technology solutions, helping companies with mobile workers run a better business with voice. Our Honeywell Voice solutions provide you with streamlined best-in-class business processes to take your organization to the next level of operating efficiency. Our extensive supply chain industry domain expertise has helped us successfully onboard almost one million mobile workers around the world.
Honeywell offers the number one voice solution in the industry, specifically designed to fully leverage existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) and warehouse management system (WMS) technology investments with the industry’s broadest and deepest data integration solution portfolio. We provide an elegantly integrated solution from the headset to host data system for maximum worker confidence and ergonomics. Honeywell is proud to lead the industry forward with our market-leading Honeywell A700X Series solutions that help optimize voice and scanning.
Delivering results starts with our Value Engagement Process, where our team learns more about your specific business objectives as we gain an understanding of your detailed operational and workflow processes. We meet with key management to better understand the prioritization of the business issues that you want to address.
Together, we will physically walk through one of your targeted facilities to document and observe workers executing various tasks. Our observations and recommendations go well beyond just where voice technology could add quantifiable business value. After all, we want to help you run a better business with voice.
Honeywell Voice — Value with Velocity: Rapidly Relieve Your Operational Pressures
Time to value cannot be measured in years. Success must be measured in weeks and months. Your velocity toward gaining business value is a key operational deliverable and a reason why Honeywell continues to stand tall as the industry’s most trusted and deployed voice solution. The majority of our customers show a measurable hard investment break-even in less than nine months. This does not even take into account the many soft benefits obtained from implementing our solutions. You achieve business benefits rapidly by starting with best-in-class business processes, proven at
thousands of individual customer implementations. Then together, we enhance the solution to fit your unique requirements.
From One to Multiple Sites, Across a Broad Range of Industries
We have a proven global best practice pedigree across a multitude of industries. Our Voice solutions excel at providing more successful multi-site implementations than all of our competitors combined. We attribute this success to providing our customers with quantifiable value after their first site implementation, which provides the continuing business justification to implement our solution at additional locations.
Meeting Your Industry’s Challenges with Robust Technology Solutions
The success of our customers speaks volumes. Our interaction across many industries and diverse customer requirements enables our users to gain valuable insights outside their own industry. As an example, certain customers were confronted with addressing multi-channel order fulfillment issues well in advance of other segments. This has afforded us the opportunity to help develop optimized best practices for multi-channel order fulfillment environments, well before it became an industry requirement. We also gained early insight into traceability mandates through working with customers wanting to support upcoming traceability requirements, long before they became ubiquitous in the marketplace and are now having an impact on virtually every industry.
Optimized Operational Flexibility: Maximum Worker Utilization
The addition of our Honeywell voice solutions to your distribution center operations offers you the transformative workforce performance gains you require, with the infrastructure flexibility you need. While voice technology was initially implemented to enhance the process flow for various fulfillment tasks, the extremely positive operational benefits companies netted resulted in a growing number of them expanding their use of our voice solutions into other areas of their distribution center. Honeywell Voice solutions provide you with the immediate operational benefits you desire, without multi-year infrastructure commitments that help reduce your flexibility to adapt to changes in the business environment. You can even add Voice to an existing infrastructure such as handheld scanning, Pick-to-Light and various automation environments.
More Confident Workers with Honeywell RapidStart
We all know that confident workers typically outperform their peers. At Honeywell, we are always looking for ways to raise the worker confidence bar and to help reduce the burden on management to train workers. Our solution to this problem is Honeywell RapidStart™, which enables workers to practically teach themselves with a consistent training experience. Using Honeywell RapidStart greatly reduces the time needed for supervisor-led instruction and helps a worker learn how to use Honeywell voice solutions through audio and video cues, using any browser-based device with a display, taking them through a self-guided tour. It uses self-evident teaching aids for the worker and enables supervisors to follow their training progress remotely with their smartphones or tablets.
Seamless and Scalable Integration: Supporting Industry Standards and Practices
Our industry experience has shown us that no two customers’ business processes are exactly the same. Thus, it’s vital that our integration architecture be flexible to accommodate many potential customer infrastructure configurations. Honeywell Voice solutions offer the deepest and broadest range of enterprise connectors to support virtually every architectural environment requirement. You even have the flexibility to leverage different enterprise connectors in differing areas of your business.
Balancing the needs of operations management, IT and the actual workers is why Honeywell continues to lead the voice industry forward. Only Honeywell Voice solutions give you the choice and flexibility to manage your IT infrastructure the way you want to – while helping your business run better.
Honeywell SoundSense
Our groundbreaking Honeywell SoundSense™ voice recognition technology, when using the Honeywell Voice wireless headset, helps reduce unwanted word and sound insertions by more than 50% with its high-fidelity acoustic sampling capabilities.
A typical headset picks up standard warehouse noises that are then processed by a voice recognition engine. This includes common sounds such as pallet drops, truck beeps, conveyer system mechanism sounds and freezer fans. Each of these unwanted “noises” causes voice recognition sound interpretation delays. Honeywell SoundSense technology is a major leap forward in helping to improve the worker experience
Honeywell Voice Software
Honeywell provides a complete solution that was developed together, enabling all of the components to transform your distribution center workflows. We make sure that the focus is on future-proofing your operation and not turning your voice solution into a one-off project.
Development Platform: Honeywell VoiceArtisan
Honeywell VoiceArtisan™ is our flagship integrated development environment (IDE) software platform. Honeywell VoiceArtisan enables customers and partners to expand the capabilities of our solutions using rapid application development (RAD) techniques. Honeywell VoiceArtisan is an open, flexible and extensible modern IDE that enables certified partners and trained customer IT teams to design, code, deploy and maintain customer-defined solutions to address unique business requirements beyond existing out-of-the-box software functionality.
Voice Software: Honeywell VoiceCatalyst
Honeywell VoiceCatalyst™ enables unparalleled connectivity to devices, servers and information and provides the launching point for implementing voice-enabled operations to achieve the highest levels of productivity. Superior speech recognition with Honeywell BlueStreak™ personalized recognition is what makes Honeywell the top choice for voice solutions that power eyes-free, handsfree work by mobile workers. Honeywell VoiceCatalyst offers multiple-language and enhanced dialect support to personalize the user experience. And it gets smarter over time, thanks to Honeywell Adaptive Speech Recognition, which improves recognition of your workers the more they use Honeywell VoiceCatalyst.
Voice Application: Honeywell VoiceApplications
Honeywell VoiceApplications™ leverage the extendable Honeywell VoiceCatalyst architecture to seamlessly interleave Honeywell VoiceApplications to complement the voice enablement of tasks and workflow execution. The seamless connection of multiple data sources with your task workflows enables endless customization possibilities to streamline warehouse processes. Honeywell VoiceApplications can be used to provide supervisors with real-time exception notifications needing approval, notifications of exceptions on a receiving or loading dock needing release approvals, or real-time access to key ERP or WMS information to streamline warehouse processes. It can also enable workers to send recorded messages to an alert display management system.
Device and Voice Management: Honeywell VoiceConsole
Honeywell VoiceConsole™ is a full-featured, web-based application that helps you to easily manage and support your voice-enabled workforce by providing asset tracking, system diagnostics and device, operator and configuration management, all through a self-evident interface. Honeywell VoiceConsole allows you to view which workers are currently using voice-enabled devices and helps you to identify the tasks they are actively working on. Configurable notifications can be triggered for real-time responses while the homepage displays high-level information.
Honeywell Honeywell Voice Hardware
Elegant Design for Maximum Worker Ergonomics
High-volume workflows that include occasional scanning tasks now have a powerful and ergonomic option: the Honeywell A730x mobile device. The A730x mobile device offers our market-leading Honeywell Voice recognition plus an integrated short-range scanner – workers can even scan hands free. For workers that occasionally require a scanner for tasks such as order induction or serial and lot number capture, you will be hard-pressed to find a more elegant and ergonomic solution.
Honeywell A700x Series solutions include models without a scanner end-cap as well as models supporting wired and wireless headsets. Honeywell A700x Series devices help reduce worker downtime due to battery changes with our smart predictive battery management capabilities. The various A700 Series device models all use a common infrastructure of chargers, headsets and accessories to provide you with maximum IT support flexibility.
Voice-Optimized Headsets
Only Honeywell offers industrial-grade headsets that are specifically designed and manufactured to support challenging warehouse environments. We understand what is required to maximize the headset experience, which is often the weakest link in a positive worker experience.
Honeywell provides the flexibility to use either a wireless or wired headset option. We also offer headsets that are optimized for the challenging freezer and high-noise conveyor environments. Headset styles include versions worn behind the head, over the top of the head or with hard hats. With our broad portfolio of headsets, you will find a headset choice to meet your specific demands.
The Honeywell SRX2 wireless headset sets an entirely new standard for how workers work in the distribution center. It greatly enhances the worker experience by providing the most comfortable and ergonomic wireless headset option available. The Honeywell SRX2 wireless headset leverages Honeywel SoundSense voice recognition technology, offering unmatched accuracy. Using Honeywel TouchConnect™, a worker can quickly pair their Honeywellwireless headset with a simple “touch”, reducing shift start-up procedures from minutes to seconds. The innovative, shareable component design enables shared use of electronics across multiple shifts, reducing both the upfront and the ongoing cost of ownership.
Predictive Battery Management
No battery lasts forever. Our advanced predictive battery management minimizes the possibility that workers will be interrupted during their shift to replace batteries in their equipment. We approached this problem in two ways: from the voice worker’s perspective and from the operations manager’s perspective.
For voice workers, we help to reduce time wasted for unexpected battery changes by enabling workers to ask a device how much battery runtime remains on their A700X Series mobile device. Based on the device’s response, a worker can then plan accordingly.
For operations managers, our advanced predictive battery management offers clear visual indications at the battery charging station about the health of each battery, enabling managers to better plan for future inventory needs. You can also configure your battery health parameters in Honeywell VoiceConsole so that your battery warnings best fit your usage patterns and environment. This is just another example of how Honeywell can help you run a better business with voice.
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