Vangard Voice Partners with BellHawk Systems

Vangard Voice Systems and BellHawk Systems have teamed up to offer voice-directed productivity enhancements to cloud-based warehouse management (WMS), manufacturing execution (MES) and supply chain management solutions.

The partnership leverages Vangard's innovative, cloud-compliant mobile voice solution to deliver affordable hands-free voice productivity to midsized industrial organizations such as manufacturers and food processors.

"The BellHawk-Vangard system exploits Vangard's completely mobile and cloud-compliant voice solution to further optimize the best features of the BellHawk industrial WMS/MES system, which is designed for the demanding requirements of the mid-size industrial market," said Peter Green, president of BellHawk Systems. "BellHawk's combination of Web, mobile barcode, and RFID operations tracking technology with Vangard's flexible device-based voice productivity solution can enable manufacturing workforces to employ voice commands to speed their production and distribution processes while increasing accuracy."

"Older pioneering voice solutions adopted by customers in the retail industry are dependent on costly, complex and expensive server-dependent voice integration," said Bob Bova, president and CEO of Vangard Voice Systems. "Vangard's innovative mobile voice solution completely avoids the IT server, delivering seamless integration and complete voice functionality to any industry mobile application, solely on-and-from the mobile device. Now any-size company can affordably and practically voice-upgrade their manufacturing applications with high performance cloud-based BellHawk Systems solutions further powering their workforce with high productivity voice capabilities."

Green added, "Because the Vangard technology fits in with our cloud-based technology and can support multi-lingual operation, the BellHawk-Vangard solution can extend supply chain tracking and KanBan replenishment to suppliers in China and elsewhere in Asia. Furthermore, because the BellHawk technology works with a wide range of ERP systems it also enables us to add voice-directed data collection for these systems, as well."

Examples of industrial and manufacturing capabilities delivered by the BellHawk-Vangard Voice system include the following:

• Receiving - In receiving, the user can verbally interact with the system to receive incoming materials and to print barcode tracking labels for these materials. The system can then verbally direct the user where to put the materials in the warehouse or stockroom or whether to move them to a QC or MRB area.
• Production or Order Picking: To increase the speed and accuracy of the picking process. the system verbally directs a material handler to pick locations to satisfy production jobs, KanBan replenishment, or customer orders. It collaborates with barcode scanning to verify that the correct materials have been picked, alerts the user if there is a picking error, then voice-directs the user to the correct location or container in which to place the material.
• Manufacturing Production: In production, the system informs the user (step-by-step) regarding the designated materials, amounts, and sequences required in the manufacturing process. Voice alerts can be used in combination with barcode scanning to alert users if they are attempting to use incorrect or non-complaint (quality control) materials.
• Shipping: In shipping, voice commands can be used to direct the system when to automatically print barcode labels for the finished products in customer-specific formats, directs users to the designated truck for loading pallets, and alerts users when barcode scanners or RFID readers have detected pallets being loaded on the wrong truck or trailer.