Lighthouse for the Blind Selects Intermec Mobile Devices and Genesta's SyVox

ST. LOUIS - The primary mission of the Lighthouse for the Blind is to create jobs for those living with vision loss. The organization's 25,000-square-foot St. Louis packing facility fulfills this mission by assembling large medical kits for the U.S. government. With warehouse management and speech recognition technology from Intermec Inc. and Genesta, the organization's blind employees now can locate and pick items to help the company ship hundreds of kits each year.

The new inventory, navigation and picking system, integrated by Primary Marking, combines Intermec 750 mobile computers and SF51 scanners with Genesta's SyVox speech recognition software. Primary Marking also developed interface software that allows the collected data to go into Lighthouse for the Blind's ERP system.

"We needed a warehouse management solution that was completely blind friendly, as ninety percent of our employees are legally blind," said Lighthouse for the Blind IT manager Mark Adams. "In the past we could not use blind workers to retrieve raw materials, as some of the kits contain more than 500 items and are large enough to ship on fifteen pallets," Adams said.

"The new Intermec and SyVox system allows our blind employees to locate and pick the items completely by speech," said Adams. "And the custom software written by Primary Marking feeds the collected information directly into our ERP system, so we achieve greater inventory accuracy."

"We also chose to work with Intermec because of the company's experience in RFID data collection," said Adams. "Lighthouse for the Blind soon will have to comply with RFID shipping requirements, and Intermec understands that technology and where it is going, so they can take our data collection technology where it needs to be."