Mobile technology helps track safety seals on shipping containers

Mississauga, ON, March 30, 2005 -- (MobileVillage) -- Psion Teklogix and Anyware Mobile Solutions today announced that they are working together to deliver a new automated system for tracking safety seal numbers on product containers used for transporting and distributing raw materials to manufacturers.

Base Inc. is one of the first customers to use the SealTrac solution to track and record approximately 60,000 seal numbers on shipments of corn syrup, which it supplies to major soft drink manufacturers, as well as to its parent company The Bama Companies Inc., an international maker of frozen bakery products and pizza crust dough for restaurant chains.

With compliance to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's 2002 Bioterrorism Act on the horizon, companies will soon be required to keep strict records of all internal processes relating to the shipping and receiving of food. The joint SealTrac solution helps with this compliancy by providing additional security and automated tracking capabilities to protect food commodities from tampering, and by creating product lot traceability from supplier to customer.

The SealTrac solution uses Psion Teklogix' 7535 or Workabout Pro handheld computers to automate the tracking and data entry processes involved in monitoring security seals affixed to various contact points on rail cars, hoses, tanks, totes, truck trailers and other user-defined contact points.

Previously, Base Inc. used a paper-based system which was highly time consuming, inefficient and error prone. Incorrect seal numbers on a load of corn syrup can result in the product being rejected by the recipient and sent back for testing an expensive process that can cost up to US $25,000 per incident, depending on the situation.

"We use approximately 60,000 seals a year, and if you have to check 60,000 seals three times, there is a lot of labor involved and margin for error," says Jim Youngblood, general manager for Base Inc. "The SealTrac solution will help us reduce these expensive errors, as well as our labor costs and the time it takes to process products."

With SealTrac, barcode labels are attached to each contact point where product can be accessed and possibly contaminated, and then scanned with Psion Teklogix handhelds, to verify the placement and removal of the safety seals. The devices enable information to be captured directly from the barcode on the seal without the risk of manual errors. As well, real-time wireless information flow from the handhelds to a central Seal Log database allows immediate reporting on the status of a shipment.

For more information on Psion Teklogix and its handhelds, see the company's summary page on MobileVillage. For more information on Anywhere Solutions, see the company's site at goanyware.com.

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