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Emerson et Cie is a manufacturer of fine furniture and accessories located in the furniture mecca of High Point, NC. The furniture industry has a major furniture market semi-annually in High Point where dealers and manufacturers from all over the world come to buy and sell their latest products.

All of the pieces of furniture in the showroom have a tag showing the price of the item, and the prices of any optional fabrics, finishes, etc. In the past, the reps use a pen and paper order sheet to scribble down the numbers and the prices of the items. When they were finished adding items to the order, they would sit down and calculate all of the prices. Usually, the customer would not have time to wait for this and would leave with only a handwritten list of the items they ordered. This procedure was very error prone and would often result in the wrong items and incorrect pricing on the order. To make this process quicker and more accurate, we created bar codes for these tags that allow the sales reps to use Visor handhelds with Symbol bar code scanners to quickly add the pieces to an order as they walk through the showroom with their customer. When the customer is finished with the order, a HotSync is performed with a PC, where the order can be customized, verified and printed. All of the prices are automatically calculated and displayed for each line item on the order. The customer leaves with a fully priced acknowledgement and the sales rep moves on to the next customer. The final piece of the system creates files that can be imported into their SBT accounting system, so that the orders do not have to be entered manually. The entire order process now requires very little human intervention, and results in much more accurate orders.

One of the goals of this project was to speed up the order writing process, thereby allowing more customers to be served and more products to be sold. The sales manager set a goal of 2400 pieces to be sold during the market and the new system allowed them to exceed this goal and resulted in over 3000 pieces sold.

Some of the reps have other furniture lines that use bar coding devices, but most said this was far easier than the others. One of the advantages of using the Visor handhelds is that the order can be reviewed and modified on the screen, complete with pricing. Most of the other systems available make this very difficult or even impossible, since most use a dedicated bar code scanner that has many confusing buttons and a tiny screen. The system was intended to be used only by trained sales reps, but ended up being so simple to use, that some customers requested that they be allowed to scan the items themselves.

Another advantage to using the Visor handhelds for this application is that the sales reps can use the handhelds all year long for contact management, scheduling, etc., and simply insert the bar code scanning module when they come to the market twice a year. A dedicated scanner would sit unused for the majority of the year, since it can only be used for one thing. Based on the client's research, the Visor and scanning module actually cost less than a dedicated scanner anyway, making the decision to use them very simple.