Haulier Besson can locate any package almost anywhere at any time. 

Introduction

This application is used by a French freight company that specializes in cloth transport and delivery.  Haulier Besson picks up the packages at the warehouse and ships them to the customer.  They have 80 trucks which are used throughout the country.

General application description

The main purpose of this application is to allow better efficiency and security of the transport, for the freight company and for the customer.  All this is based on the capture of information concerning the packages (destination and origin).

To capture this data at the beginning of the chain when the packages are picked up, it requires that all delivery drivers have a BARman at their disposal.  They can capture all the needed data very quickly and efficiently.  Of course, this is only possible if everyone has labels, which contain the same kind of information posted on their packages.  Therefore, the delivery company distributes labels with a personal code for every customer and a different number for every package, both in barcode form.  It is because of these numbers that every package is easily recognizable.  Losses can be avoided or spotted early enough to permit an inquiry to find the missing packages.  The distribution is carried out every day by the delivery drivers to the customers in each department.

To allow such a follow up and control of all the parcels, Haulier Besson needs a record of the data concerning the source of the expedition and its destination.  Therefore, as said above, the customer has to paste a label on each package needed to be sent.

These labels, furnished by the transport company, are composed of a barcode and an empty square, in which will be filled in with the destination department number.  The barcode contains the information about the customer and the package itself (each label has a sequential number and a customer number). 

So when delivery drivers arrive to each warehouse, they manually enter in the BARman the quantity of packages to be picked up and capture the barcode of each one. 

Then they bring back the whole shipment to the sorting center and lay the BARman on the interface for a download of all the information before or while the truck is being unloaded.  In this way, a security check can be carried out between the total number of packages which should be in the truck and the number that is really there.

At the next step the packages are weighed and their barcode is captured again.  In this way, the delivery driver creates a data base composed of:

• customer's name

• package's identification

• destination

• weight

Thanks to the BARman, the invoicing can be done automatically!

Once this is completed, the packages, recognizable due to the label, are sorted after they arrive to their destination site.  The BARmans are put on the interfaces at the end of the day for a full recharge at the sorting center.

The benefits of mobile data capture

Before the introduction of the mobile data capture, the information was noted down on small sheets which were often lost or not correctly filled in. The other problem was that the organization was very difficult to manage.  Now, thanks to BARman, the freight company can follow a package throughout its trip and locate it almost anywhere at any time.  The security is enhanced and therefore the material losses are reduced to nearly zero.