Coming Soon: ZebraCare™ On-Site Service Agreements to Expand Your Service, Expand Your Reach, Expand Your Revenues
 
Zebra is planning to launch ZebraCare On-Site service early in the fourth quarter of 2007. ZebraCare On-Site has been designed as an alternative to the current Zebra Independent Service Provider (ZISP) program, which Zebra Authorized Service Providers™ (ZASPs™) and other partners have regularly used to extend their service coverage. With this exciting alternative to the ZISP program, there are three primary benefits for you:
 
1. You will be reselling ZebraCare contracts, which will result in additional revenue for your business -- without needing to increase your resources. This is revenue ZASPs and other PartnersFirst® members can apply towards PartnersFirst revenue targets.
 
2. You will no longer need to negotiate and manage separate service deals with third-party ZISPs, which will reduce time, paperwork and personnel costs.
 
3. You will be selling a Zebra-branded solution. This gives you a higher degree of leverage in the marketplace thanks to Zebra's quality reputation. It also means you'll barely have to lift a finger once you place a service agreement; Zebra is responsible for supporting the agreement and will take care of everything for you.
 
In addition, you'll increase customer loyalty by being able to offer a wider choice of service agreements.
 
More details, along with frequently asked questions regarding this offering, will be forthcoming in the following weeks.

-------
 
Reminder: New ZebraLink Course
 
Do you need a way to monitor the status your Zebra label printers on your network regardless if they are all in a single location or spread around the world? Does your crises management or disaster recovery plan include moving production to other areas or the use of "hot swaps" for machine-down incidents? Is there a project coming up where you will need to update files you have stored on the printers you already have because of process changes or changes in company name/logo?
 
If yes, then maybe you need a tool to use when installing new printers to load graphics, fonts, formats, and parameters for the first time or update firmware.
 
The NEW ZebraLink Course will cover the program products Zebra offers for the management and easy use of your Zebra label printers. We have designed this course so end users, PartnersFirst® Members, VARs and ZASPs™ can all attend this class to learn how to use the ZebraNet™ Bridge Enterprise and ZebraDesigner™ products to effectively and easily.
 
The course is designed as a lab based course with each student taking home with them a full functioning copy of ZebraNet Bridge Enterprise, and ZebraDesigner along with the samples of all of the exercises they do in class. This will provide quick reference material when they return home and start to use these tools.
 
The ZebraLink Course is not designed to be a network administration class. This course is not the place for label design assistance and should not be considered a label reverse engineering class. This training requires that all students be familiar with networks and network operations.
 
The course is being offered for $425 and will be held in Vernon Hills, IL. Spaces are limited, so register soon! For more information on the ZebraLink Course, please contact Bruce Henderson at bhenderson@zebra.com or click here.
 
Click here to see the full schedule of classes for the rest of the year.
 
And for more information on ZebraLink Solutions visit zebra.com.

Zebra Selects Anders Gustafsson as Chief Executive Officer
 
On September 4, Anders Gustafsson became Zebra's chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors. Mr. Gustafsson succeeds Edward L. Kaplan, Zebra's chairman and CEO who is retiring after 37 years. Mr. Kaplan co-founded Zebra with Gerhard Cless, who is currently executive vice president and a member of the board of directors. Mr. Kaplan has agreed to remain on the board for the remainder of his term, through the next annual meeting of stockholders in May 2008, and he will also serve as a consultant to Mr. Gustafsson.
 
Prior to joining Zebra, Mr. Gustafsson, age 47, served as CEO of Spirent Communications plc, a leading publicly traded telecommunications company. At Spirent, Mr. Gustafsson redirected that company's growth strategy, divested non-core operations, integrated historic acquisitions and streamlined the organization to realize significant cost savings. Prior to Spirent, he was senior executive vice president, global business operations, of Tellabs, Inc. While at Tellabs, Mr. Gustafsson also served as president, Tellabs International, as well as president, global sales, and vice president and general manager, Europe, Middle East and Africa. Earlier in his career, he held executive positions with Motorola and Network Equipment Technologies.
 
Zebra's board of directors selected Mr. Gustafsson based on his record of business accomplishments as well as his technical and manufacturing expertise, sales and marketing capabilities and substantial international experience.
 
"Anders Gustafsson is the right choice as Zebra's next CEO," stated Mr. Kaplan. "I look forward to assisting him as we continue to enhance our record on the strong platform that has been built over the past several years. I believe that he is an unusually talented person who can take Zebra forward in new ways to create additional value for our stockholders."
 
Mr. Gustafsson has an M.B.A. from the Harvard Graduate School of Business and a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. He was a Fulbright Scholar and received numerous fellowships and scholarships for academic excellence.
 
Commenting on his appointment, Mr. Gustafsson said, "I am excited about working with Zebra's leadership team to develop and execute on strategies to achieve full potential for our stockholders. Zebra has established a leading position in its industry, and is poised to grow its business substantially."
 
As a part of the change in executive leadership, Michael A. Smith, a Board member since 1991, will become chairman of the board of directors. Mr. Smith stated, "All of us at Zebra enthusiastically look forward to working with Anders to discover new business opportunities and to drive growth."

RFID Helps Tennessee Pride Ease the Grind of Sausage Making and Compliance
 
Challenge
A secret recipe of spices sets sausage maker Odom's Tennessee Pride apart from its competitors. Its logistics operations set it apart from many other companies that need to provide RFID shipping labels to comply with customer requirements.
 
"We couldn't take the slap-and-ship approach to meeting our RFID mandate requirement," said Mike Hader, director of information technologies at Odom's Tennessee Pride. "Our processes required that we applied RFID tags in a real-time, in-line process in our plant."
 
Tennessee Pride uses a dedicated cold storage third party logistics provider to distribute its products to retail customers. The 3PL did not have any RFID capabilities, which required Tennessee Pride to develop its own system to tag cases and cartons before they were transferred to the 3PL.
 
"We investigated, and found it would cost us more in the long-term to outsource our RFID labeling. We knew it was best to bring RFID capability into our plant," said Hader. "We were interested in using RFID not only to meet the mandate, but also to improve our own processes."
 
That brought a new set of challenges, because plant operations were already highly automated and efficient, so the RFID system had to fit in without slowing things down. Tennessee Pride runs production for two shifts then tears down and cleans its lines during the third. The lines are in constant use, so there is no time available to shut down to test and troubleshoot RFID configurations.
 
"We looked for a partner who could provide a reliable, scalable, system and bring in vendors with world-class capabilities to fit into a large-scale IT infrastructure and cause minimal change to the processes we already had in place," said Hader.
 
Solution
Rush Tracking System provided the integration and engineering expertise, and relied on Zebra Technologies to provide world-class, reliable and integration friendly RFID printer/encoders.
 
Rush integrated Zebra's R110XiIIIPlus™ printer/encoders and RFID middleware from OATSystems into Tennessee Pride's production lines and industrial control system. The system passes data from Tennessee Pride's ERP applications to an R110XiIIIPlus on the production line, which generates a carton label with bar code and human readable information plus an EPCglobal Gen 2-standard RFID tag. An automated applicator from Weber Marking Systems applies the smart label to the moving carton at production speeds.
 
"This system is unusual because it can handle regular orders that are interspersed with orders that require RFID labeling," said Toby Rush, president of Rush Tracking Systems. "We used enterprise-class components to get the speed, scalability and reliability Tennessee Pride needed for its highly automated environment."
 
After cartons are automatically labeled, the legacy conveyor and industrial control systems route them to the appropriate palletizing station. Once the pallet has been robotically stacked and wrapped, workers use a cart-mounted R110XiIIIPlus to produce the pallet label, which is hand-applied. Labeled pallets are then brought through an RFID portal reader from Motorola for order validation prior to releasing them for shipment.
 
"The printer/encoder integration went very smooth because Zebra is such a well-known standard," said Hader. "Practically everybody - production control systems, industrial controllers, software - talks to Zebra printers. There is more interface support for Zebra than you find for lesser-known brands, which helped our integration."
 
Results
Tennessee Pride met its goal of compliance without compromise. Legacy operations continue to run as quickly and efficiently as before, and the RFID system is running even more smoothly than Hader expected.
 
"With Rush Tracking as our partner, we were able to develop a strategy that let us implement the technology with minimal downtime to our operations and create a scalable system that is friendly to our operations and to our users in the plant," he said. "The Rush team did a great job on system engineering and in bringing all the components together, and the Zebra printers have done a tremendous job for us."
 
Tennessee Pride is also meeting its goal of using RFID to improve operations.
 
"One of the ways Tennessee Pride attempts to be a leader in food safety and quality is through our use of technology. We are using the data we get from our RFID system, and we are always looking for ways we can improve our processes and the technology that our processes depend upon," said Hader. "We find that RFID is a great benefit."

New Supplies Photos Available on Access Zebra
 
The Zebra supplies team has added six new supplies photographs to Access Zebra.
 
These new supplies photographs are a great way to promote genuine Zebra™ supplies, as they highlight Zebra's innovative new products – Z-Slip and 8000T Cling – and our custom capabilities. The images also show how Zebra's broad product offering meets the needs of many applications.
 
The photographs include a combination of pre-printed color, printed and blank ZipShip^sm and custom media. The new images include:

• Desktop supplies – a combination of labels, tags, wristbands and ribbons
• Floodcoat supplies – many of the colors available with our new Z-Perform™ Floodcoat ZipShip product line
• Mobile supplies – a combination of labels and receipt paper
• Overall supplies – a combination of desktop, tabletop and mobile labels, tags, wristbands and ribbons
• Ribbons – tabletop and desktop
• Tabletop supplies – a combination of labels, tags, wristbands and ribbons

The following marketing tools are now available:

• NEW white paper: Unchaining the Value of RFID: How closed-loop systems provide flexibility and fast ROI (PDF: 315 KB)
• NEW flyer: Mobile Workforce Public Safety (PDF: 242 KB)
• NEW flyer: Mobile Workforce Local Government Operations (PDF: 226 KB)
• NEW flyer: Mobile Workforce Route Operations (PDF: 227 KB)
• NEW flyer: Mobile Workforce Field Service (PDF: 211 KB)

Did you know that you can view Zebra's latest marketing tools online? Visit www.accesszebra.com to download files.
 
(If you don't have access to AccessZebra, please visit www.accesszebra.com to request a username and password.)