The Ahauser group of companies Kurt Pietsch GmbH & Co KG offers their customers a rather forward-looking purchasing system. The Pietsch Group paid extra attention to Germany's leading wholesalers for sanitation, heating and air conditioning. With the new barcode ordering system, customers can now order directly out of the catalog, online. The process can be described as thus: the 0.5cm² large mini-2-D barcodes of the products that are printed in the catalog are simple read by the smartSCANNDY, then saved and directly sent through the customer's PC to the Pietsch Group's web-shop. Thus, customers may avoid the entire typing in of the order number which also means no more typos and time-wasting. From the customer's side, she will no longer have to deal with the substantial cost of receiving a wrong delivery. The Pietsch Group's product catalog is 1,250 pages with over 30,000 products, to each of which belongs a miniature order-barcode. In contrast to conventional barcodes, mini-barcodes save significantly not only printing costs for catalogues, but also in ordering costs. However, capturing these mini-barcodes within the narrow amount of space given is problematic.

“If many small barcodes are stationed tightly next to each other, you can't be sure whether or not the right code was captured. PANMOBIL has solved this problem for us with their Small Code Pointer,” explained Graf, Information Systems Manager of the Pietsch Group. The item developed by PANMOBIL has enabled the smartSCANNDY barcode scanner to capture any mini-barcode precisely by solidly defining the barcode reading range of the SCANNDY. The hand-fitting design and the easy, self-explanatory usage of the smartSCANNDY with its three buttons further strengthened the superiority of this solution. In addition, the smartSCANNDY can be operated by any person without previous knowledge or experience or a complicated user manual.

“PANMOBIL quickly presented us with the right solution that fulfilled our requirements. After tests that ran very good, we've now sent the barcode scanner smartSCANNDYs to our customers and obtained positive feedback.

We see the strengthened performance of the Information Systems as a big chance to better link the processes between industries, retail and trades and to form greater efficiency,” said Graf.

With PANMOBIL's barcode scanners, the Pietsch Group was able to both save costs on internal data processing and also to streamline the purchasing system. With product orders being sent directly sent to the web-shop and the increase in the updating and quality of the data, the danger of wrong deliveries has been greatly minimized and thus savings on ordering processing also resulted.