Counting The Bottles On The WallCounting The Bottles On The Wall

The New Hampshire State Liquor Commission, in an effort to better manage about 36 million bottles of alcohol that are sold through its 74 stores around the state, is replacing bar-code devices with a system from Hand Held Products Inc. The system includes the company's Adaptus Imaging Technology platform integrated into its Dolphin 9500 mobile computers.

The legacy bar-code systems the commission had been using since 1988 became a maintenance nightmare. Unlike the new handhelds, the older devices have lots of moving parts that often break down as they age. The result was that employees often had to manually rekey in bar-code data during the inventory process, which often caused errors.

The Adaptus Imaging platform takes a picture of the bar code and turns the image into text that can be used by applications. The state's commission has tested the technology for three months at six stores and has seen positive results, says Howard Roundy, director of IT. Already, the commission has considerably cut the time it takes for individual stores to inventory products on the shelves, and Roundy says the Hand Held Products' system ultimately will help cut inventory times by as much as 50%. "Saving half the time on taking in-store inventory is also going to mean cutting half the costs," he says.

The commission adopted Hand Held Products' image-based data-collection system, priced at about $2,000, in August to simplify and speed up inventory processes that are typically conducted at stores four times a year. But the commission has discovered that the imaging technology can be used for other purposes as well. For instance, using the Adaptus software, the commission can take digital images of damaged packages and use them to obtain return approvals during the damage-claim process.

Now that internal testing is complete, Roundy says, the commission has begun rolling out the system to all the liquor stores throughout New Hampshire. It will be fully deployed within a week.