If you're assessing a new machine vision project and you want to get it right, there’s only one thing you must do: Ask the right questions. It’s that simple. The likelihood of nailing the perfect solution without completing a thorough assessment is low, and the likelihood of completing a thorough assessment is low if you don’t ask the right questions of every consultant, technology provider, and integrator every time.

If sales are holding steady or even growing, you may not realize that your convenience rating is dropping with shoppers and that, at any moment, they may decide you’re no longer the best option for them. Every time they come into your store, they’re judging you. They’re deciding whether it was convenient or not to browse your inventory or buy what they needed.

Recently, on the Your Edge podcast, I spoke about how your organization’s culture directly affects your employees’ ability to support customers – how your values influence employee actions. Well, this spurred some conversations about whether it’s more important to invest in your organization’s culture for the sake of your customers or your employees.

You may have heard of Scrum but aren’t sure what it is or how it benefits the business. Or perhaps you use it but others in your organization don’t understand it. As a certified Scrum master, I’d like to share a bit about how I’ve used Scrum to transform my work and my team’s working model to improve efficiency, among other things. I truly believe it can help you once you (or others in your organization) understand its purpose and how it’s meant to be applied.

If you use Zebra desktop, industrial, or mobile printers, you’re going to want to download the free Zebra Print App from the Google Play Store on all your Android mobile devices today. Why? Because this is the app that’s going to help you instantly get your Zebra printers connected and secured on your network. It’s also the app that’s going to make it super simple for your frontline workers to print labels, PDFs, pictures, and other media from their Android mobile devices.

There’s this notion that a secure network of devices is not good enough…that what you need is a network of secure devices. However, at Zebra, we believe the only thing that’s acceptable these days is a secure network of secure devices. That’s why we’re working with Google Cloud and Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. to look deep into on-prem and cloud architectures to implement the best security features at every potential access point.

“Elevated.” That’s the word often used to describe the ideal modern shopping experience. “Convenient” is another. I think they’re often one in the same. It doesn’t matter if you’re an operations manager for a c-store, big box store or a luxury boutique, your customers will never rate the shopping experience with your brand as “elevated” if they don’t find it convenient in some way.

Zebra’s acquisition of the Motorola Solutions Enterprise Business in October 2014 is the largest acquisition we have made in terms of deal size and employee integration. We think the acquisition’s lasting significance stems from its impact on the millions of frontline workers globally who need increased capabilities from technology-based solutions to tackle everything that’s now on their plates.

It’s always a fear of the unknown that seems to sideline us, right? We don’t know what to expect, so we start devising all these worst-case scenarios in our head. By the time our minds are done mapping out all these scenarios, we’ve come to believe that whatever we were thinking about doing “isn’t worth the risk.” In business, it’s this fear that stifles innovation, progress, improvement, digital transformation…whatever you want to call it. Not budget.

Depending on where you are in the world, you may be hearing conflicting reports about the current state (and future) of the manufacturing workforce. For example, here in the U.S., some leaders are touting the creation of hundreds of thousands of new manufacturing jobs as a signal of improving economic health. However, this good news is counterbalanced by a stark truth: millions of manufacturing jobs are likely to go unfilled in the next 5-6 years in the country.