The Authentic Food Company (TAFC) is a family business that manufactures frozen ready meals and snacks for foodservice and retail companies across the UK and Europe. Its most recent acquisition is a state-of-the-art frozen ready meals facility in Dundalk, Ireland, previously owned by Heinz. TAFC wanted to install a similar system in Ireland to the one at its main site in Manchester. This required the removal of the Heinz equipment and network and the installation of TAFC’s own handheld infrastructure and devices.
Raz Barkatali, TAFC’s IT Manager, comments: “For the past five years, we’ve been using Spirit Data Capture Limited in the UK to provide our mobile enterprise needs. Spirit was therefore the obvious choice to help with rolling out the same solution to replace the existing installation in Dundalk.”
Spirit subsequently sourced and implemented the WiFi network and other equipment, including the Motorola MC9190s. The MC9190 is a rugged, gun-style mobile computer which has 802.11a/b/g wireless as standard. It’s ideal for data capture in harsh working environments and incorporates the latest barcode scanning technology. It also offers a choice of six interchangeable keypads.
The MC9190s are used in the warehouse factory areas and are all connected to the network via Cisco access points. Spirit helped with the installation, configuration, training and support of the devices, including a swap-over of software. TAFC uses MobiControl, the leading mobile device management solution developed by SOTI, to ensure the optimal performance of its Motorola mobile computers.
Raz Barkatali continues: “The new WiFi network and Motorola devices have been performing perfectly so far and give us full traceability of all of our products. They help our warehouse and factory staff to carry out their tasks quickly and efficiently. The fact that these devices are supported from the UK has been a great advantage. Spirit’s engineer went above and beyond anything I expected from him. Whenever there was an issue, he would already have a contingency in place - and he also resolved some issues that weren’t even directly related to Spirit’s products.”