Sometimes, It just doesn’t pay to get out of bed…

First thing when I got out of bed the other day I spent a few minutes or so talking with a good customer of ours for over 6 or 7 years. This guy has used our 435 Barcode to PLC products (…) for ever. We probably shipped him one of the first ten units ever. This guy has more experience with our products than anyone.

This guy is in the pharmaceutical industry. His company makes medicine and other drugs. It’s a very automated system. They have an automatic system that automatically picks the pharmaceuticals for an order, puts it in a bottle, screws on the cover, sticks the label on, prints a packing list, instructions, throws the whole thing in a UPS envelope and prints the shipping paperwork.

Everything in his system is hands off. It has to be. You can’t have any errors when you are dealing with medicine that people take on a daily basis. All you need is one error, one wrong label, one wrong pill in one bottle out of hundreds and hundreds of thousands.  Do that and your out of business.

But they don’t have any errors. None at all. The system works and works perfectly and our 435NBx product line is a big part of it. They use our product to move data in and out of PLCs all day long. They use it to ship data to printers. They use it to move data from one database to another. They use more of it to get data from barcode readers. Everywhere in that system they use RTA product to move ASCII data from one place to another.

That’s the strength of that product line and why we are so proud of it!

But there’s more to this story. A lot more.

Sometime ago, probably about four years ago they were bought by one of their competitors. A competitor that wasn’t as good as they were. A competitor that had problems with their manufacturing system.

Sounds like we had a great opportunity to move a lot more of our Barcode to PLC (435NBx) product to the new company as a whole. After all, if they have the best system and wouldn’t the new guys want to have the best system too?

Well, no!

It turns out that the other guys don’t want anything to do with the system that works so well. Don’t want to know how it’s done right every time. Every bottle. Every hour. Every day. Nope, no thanks! We’ve got our own way to do it.

Our customer has tried a number of times to tell them about the RTA Barcode to PLC product and our 435ASCII to PLC product line but they don’t want to hear it. Last he heard they bought a PC to do this job and are planning to write a bunch of VB programs to take care of it.

YUK! Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to get out of bed in the morning…