At its annual customer conference last month, Accu-Sort introduced the AV6010, a long-range camera system that combines camera, illumination, decoder and power supplies into one unit with a single HTML interface.

While the primary application for the AV6010 is high-volume parcel shipping, product manager Maik Fuchs says its multi-feature design might make optical character recognition (OCR) conceivable for some warehousing and distribution center applications that couldn't have justified it before.

“You can use it to pack your parcels more efficiently and to schedule your trucks more effectively because the camera can measure the size of parcels so you can determine how many will fit on the truck,” he told Modern. “Also, when items aren't readable [by laser scanners] they have to be rehandled. With the OCR's better read rate, you can achieve an ROI to use it with a warehouse management system.”

Adnan Ahmed, Accu-Sort's vice president of marketing, adds that with a 75,000 hour meantime between failures, the new camera-based technology is more reliable than a laser based bar code reader system.

“It is an expensive product so you have to look at total cost of ownership,” he acknowledges.

However, further justification may come from the ability to save images for shipment documentation, as well as the possibility of monitoring facility performance and feeding that information into the IT infrastructure.

Analyst Andrew Nathanson of Venture Development Corp. told Modern this technology may open up new markets for Accu-Sort in non-traditional markets.

“I think there will be a change in the WMS market, because the value technologies like [camera-based auto-ID] can add above and beyond what traditional systems provide is immense,” he says. “It's just a matter of getting that value proposition to be understood.”