Supermarket giant Tesco can confidently claim to be delivering the goods with its Internet shopping arm having appointed mobile computing specialist Xperience to supply 300 of its largest shops with a state-of-the-art electronic order picking and fulfilment hardware solution.
The multimillion pound deal sees Xperience equipping Tesco.com with 5,000 ‘pre-imaged’ Xybernaut Atigo portable wireless flat screen computers. Alongside this, Xperience is also providing on and offsite maintenance to the deployed panels, as well as a full support process.
The Atigo-driven trolley-mounted computer system seamlessly integrates wirelessly with Tesco’s existing Windows 2003 server technology to ensure that the retailer’s own personal shoppers get the right customer order information at the right time. The Xybernaut Atigo systems are able to cope with the rigours of the supermarket environment – each unit is ruggedised to withstand shocks, and High Brightness flat panel displays allows onscreen text to be seen under bright in-store lighting.
Mike Yorwerth, head of operations and infrastructure for Tesco.com, comments: “Of all the solutions we considered when looking to upgrade our picking process, the Xperience and Xybernaut offering was by far the most powerful and convenient. Our pickers like it too because it is fast, compatible with existing systems, and has a clear, bright screen display.”
He continues: “From an IT point of view it suits our needs perfectly in that it is tough, intelligent technology, which can easily be integrated into our existing technology. We were particularly impressed, for example, by the way that the XP embedded nature removed the need for time-consuming and costly re-writing of our existing .net applications.”
