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Success Stories - Silentnight Furniture

In the last 7 years that Barcode-IT has been dealing with Silentnight Furniture, they have made a major investment into data capture and barcoding technology. Silentnight have used a combination of radio frequency terminals, wired and wireless scanners, together with bulk and on-demand printed barcoded documents to help make their warehouse and distribution centre a much more efficient environment.

Dave Kennedy, MIS Manager at Silentnight Furniture says, "We have been able to integrate these systems with our existing main business system, and now have a very effective network of data capture systems, that gives the business much greater visibility of key activities, and also provides the means to keep accurate inventory in a fast-moving high-volume environment."

The systems have been introduced throughout the furniture manufacturing plant in Sunderland, in component manufacture, stock control and product assembly. Silentnight are now about to implement the fourth phase, which will cover the loading of product onto vehicles.

Application Overview

The Silentnight Furniture data capture system is relatively straightforward. The Radio Frequency terminals (Falcon 345) connect to Silentnight’s host system using a simple VT220 terminal emulation program called PowerNet Twin Client. This means that the RF scanning terminals simply connect to the OpenVMS system like any other system terminal and allows Silentnight to develop their own applications. For printing Silentnight use small desktop Zebra printers (TLP2844) connected to the network to produce on-demand direct thermal labels and have more recently added more industrial Zebra TLP2746e printers. These devices are very simple to operate and cost effective.

Dave Kennedy goes on to say, "We have standardised on PSC scanning equipment supplied by Barcode-IT, with a combination of tethered and wireless scanners attached via 'wedge' connectors, and full RF 'Falcon' scanning terminals. The RF terminals are connected to our main business system using Cisco Aironet access points (802.11b), and provide real-time two-way access to data."

Over the last 7 years Silentnight Furniture have purchased around 45 Falcon 345 scanners with Cisco RF, 13 Zebra TLP2844 printers and 21 PowerScan scanners plus multiple copies of PowerNet and LabelMatrix software. Maintenance has also been taken out on printers and scanners so that the system functions effectively when needed. Barcode-IT provided help and support during the development phase of the project by configuring the RF terminals and Powernet software, working with the Silentnight Group central IT team based at Head Office in Salterforth, Lancashire.

How it started

When Silentnight Furniture approached Barcode-IT in 1997, Barcode-IT had already had a longstanding relationship with the Silentnight Group since 1994, providing printing and scanning solutions into other group companies. Silentnight Furniture wanted a data capture system for their warehouse in Sunderland, Barcode-IT staff helped to identify the correct equipment for the project in order to provide Silentnight with a system that would suit their needs.

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