Southern Wine Selects Intermec 6651 Mobile Computer for Route Accounting Automation

November 20, 2001

Handheld PCs automate route management and account information, improving customer service

Southern Wine & Spirits of America Inc., the nation's largest wine and liquor distributor, has selected Intermec Technologies Corp.'s 6651 mobile computer to automate its field sales force in California and Nevada.

The Windows(R) CE handheld computer allows Southern Wine sales representatives to take orders at customer locations and to automatically update their route books as well as access product and account information, thereby improving service to their customers.

The 6651s are connected to Southern Wine via a wireless wide area network providing sales people with the ability to place customer orders in real time. Prior to automation, Southern Wine sales representatives would have to phone and transmit orders to the office via other one-way communication devices. Other information updates are performed at the beginning of each workday.

"Now, in the morning a sales person plugs the 6651 into a phone line and downloads all the previous day's activities about their accounts, inventories, pricing - anything he or she needs for that day," said John Boriolo, director of information technology for Southern Wine.

"Our mobile sales application allows us to take a sales force that's been used to lugging around a five or six pound bag of written reports down to just the 6651 - that's all they have to worry about now. The need for the constant contact and communication with customer service and the order desk is no longer necessary. This frees up our sales force from a lot of tasks, giving them more time to spend cultivating new business."

The Intermec 6651 is a member of a family of Intermec pen-based, touch-screen computers designed to enhance the efficiency of mobile workforces. Its dual clamshell/pen tablet design is lightweight (1.9 pounds) and compact (8.4 x 5.5 inches), with Wi-Fi certified (802.11 high rate) wireless network capabilities to enable real-time data and video transmission. Featuring an integrated digital camera with 350,000-pixel CMOS resolution and Windows CE(R) operating system, the 6651 has a bright, crisp color active-matrix LCD screen with a 7.1-inch viewing area and 64K colors. The unit uses a Toshiba 129 MHz MIPS processor and comes standard with 32 MB RAM and a lithium ion battery pack that recharges in only 2.5 hours.

The 6651's fold-over display can be operated in either a clamshell or pen tablet format. Its "flip-screen" software feature lets users reverse the angle of the display panel to change the unit into a signature-capture device so customers can digitally sign receipts and proofs of delivery.


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