CTG Logistics Solutions

Adding Voice Technology for Voice Picking Need Not Be Difficult

Daniel Ciarcia Jr. — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:20:56 +0000

Adding voice technology to your WMS, YMS or other enterprise system for voice picking or other operations need not be difficult. CTG Montage Multimodal with Voice allows seamless integration of mobile terminals with virtually any database on any standard platform such as UNIX, Linux and Windows operating systems.

Leverage years of development of terminal emulation script programming under wireless 5250/3270, VT & SSHv2 host access and add robust, multimodal, voice technology in weeks, not months. Return on investment is measured in months, not years!

Your investment in mobile devices can also be leveraged instead of purchasing proprietary “voice-only” gear. CTG Montage Multimodal with Voice operates on any mobile device with a sound card under Windows Mobile, Windows CE, XP or Vista.

Using our noise cancelling microphones and automatic noise filtering technology, CTG has designed a multimodal mobile platform that is highly accurate in speech recognition even under extreme conditions. Voice technology reduces costly errors in warehouse operations, increases productivity by double digits and increases operator safety. Each of these metrics is measurable and repeatable using CTG Montage Multimodal with Voice.

CTG can show you how to maximize efficiency by streamlining pick, place and put processes throughout the warehouse using your standard terminal emulation system. CTG takes you from evaluation pilot to multi-site migration in just weeks.

Call a member of CTG’s sales or consulting staff today so that you can schedule your free WebEx demonstration.

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CTG Montage Multimodal Solutions: Mobile Technology for the Warehouse, Yard and More

admin — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:39:32 +0000

Modern yard and warehouse management across industries includes mobilizing the workforce. When mobile terminals replaced paper-based systems in supply chain activities, reductions in labor costs and increases in productivity and accuracy delivered a rapid return on investment for the new mobile technology. Now, as multimodal mobile systems replace basic single-task mobile systems and terminals, the cost benefits are just as remarkable.

The traditional definition of Multimodal Computing as described by Wikipedia is, ‘to interface with a system beyond the traditional the mouse and keyboard.’ True, the single task systems for barcode scanning inventory or proprietary voice picking as used in supply chain execution over the last decade would be considered multimodal by that definition. However, the emerging new definition of multimodal computing is the means of communication between data gatherers and data stores that provides multiple modes of interfacing to an enterprise’s business logic. – CTG Logistics Solutions Consulting

Virtually all warehousing tasks, such as voice picking, bulk moves, cycle counts, audits, service and maintenance, shipping, receiving, inventory taking, cross docking, asset management, and more can be securely operated by mobile systems that guide the workforce by touch-screen or by voice to accomplish any business activity required. By implementing CTG Montage Multimodal Solutions, such technologies as speech-recognition, speech synthesis, RFID, barcode scanning, GPS, digital imaging, VoIP, Bluetooth, and more are simultaneously integrated into a single mobile application that can be rapidly customized.

CTG Montage Multimodal Mobile Solutions can be used across multiple platforms, allowing you to leverage your current investment in mobile devices where appropriate. In addition, CTG offers real-time or store and forward access to your mission-critical data stores. Instead of upgrading each mobile device separately, software updates are distributed to the field automatically, ensuring that all mobile workers are on the proper software version.

Trust CTG to deliver low-cost, robust, mobile systems that integrate with your Yard or Warehouse Management System, whether it's for a proprietary, open source, COTS package or ERP module. For those searching for an enterprise system (ERP), or other management module (WMS, YMS, TMS, etc.), CTG consultants can help your team select the right package for your firm using our proven Joint Technology Selection methodology.

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CTG Logistics Solutions Group Releases a New Speech-Enabled Mobile Software Product: CTG Montage Multimodal

admin — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 23:01:21 +0000

News Release
CTG

CTG Montage Multimodal ^TM Mobile Solutions with

Vulcan Voice ^TM Increase Productivity, Accuracy and Throughput while Reducing Operating Costs

BUFFALO, NY., January 16, 2007 – Computer Task Group, Inc., CTG (NASDAQ: CTGX), a leading supplier of information technology, staffing, logistics and mobile solutions with extensive experience in warehouse, yard and distribution center automation, today announced the release of a new speech-enabled software product entitled CTG Montage Multimodal ^TM. Using the CTG Montage Multimodal platform, CTG will deliver speech-enabled multimodal mobile business applications across industries. The CTG Montage Multimodal Mobile Solution Center and new Multimodal Demonstration Lab is located in the CTG Logistics Group facility in Melbourne, FL.

The new CTG offering, CTG Montage Multimodal, incorporates its Vulcan Voice product, a state-of-the-art speech recognition and text-to-speech application that is both speaker and device independent and allows hands-free mobility to optimize the enterprise-wide management of inventory, resources and facilities. The multimodal mobile solution allows workers to interact with their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems by voice, RFID, bar code scanning, GPS, digital imaging, Bluetooth and more, all optimized for compact mobile devices operating under Windows CE and Windows Mobile. In addition, the new product allows secure access to data stores and remote control of critical business systems.

By integrating all available mobile peripherals within a single mobile user interface CTG Montage Multimodal workers can perform the various tasks of their workday using a single mobile device and a single interface. CTG develops custom mobile software rapidly with an average time savings of 75-85% over traditional front-end development saving its clients time and money.

Initial trials of the CTG Montage Multimodal mobile technology have shown a reduction in operating costs and rapid return on investment. Worker productivity, accuracy of data collection, and throughput show marked improvement across manufacturing and distribution facilities.

CTG Senior Vice President Michael Colson said, “The profitability of an organization is tightly coupled with its efficiency, which can be measured by the accuracy, timeliness and visibility of the data that it collects. CTG is pleased to announce the release of our new mobile solution that delivers near flawless data accuracy, gathered by an ensemble of voice, barcode scanning, RFID and other data capture technologies all seamlessly woven into one dynamic mobile interface, providing an increase in efficiency and in the bottom line.”

About CTG

Backed by over 40 years’ experience, CTG provides IT application management, consulting, software development, integration, and staffing solutions. CTG has provided mobility to hundreds of warehouse and distribution facilities ranging from less than 20,000 to over one million square feet, both in North America and Europe. CTG’s 3,300 IT professionals based in an international network of offices in North America and Europe have a proven track record of delivering solutions that work. More information about CTG is available on the Web at www.ctg.com.

For more information on CTG Montage Multimodal mobile solutions, please visit www.ctgLogisticsSolutions.com.

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Voice Picking Today

Daniel Ciarcia Jr. — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 22:09:29 +0000

Order picking is one of the most scrutinized tasks in the warehouse. Why? The methods for order picking can be quite complex depending upon the processing required of a given product line. Various characteristics of the order such as special labeling, routing, unique unit of measure or product demand can force process designers to implement multiple picking methods per order. Regardless of the complexity of the picking method, however, today’s multimodal Voice Picking systems by CTG consistently deliver higher accuracy, increased productivity and reduced cycle time.

CTG Montage Multimodal^TM Solutions speech-enable any picking process, including systems that employ terminal emulation, custom mobile user interfaces, or a combination of both. Operating on virtually any mobile computer running Windows Mobile or Windows CE, CTG Montage Multimodal^TM leverages your current investment in mobile devices and seamlessly integrates additional technologies that work in concert with the voice picking system such as RFID, barcode scanning, GPS, digital imaging, VoIP, Bluetooth, and more depending upon the peripherals available in the mobile devices employed. Mobile computers like Intermec’s CK-61 are being used around the globe for voice picking applications implementing CTG Montage Multimodal^TM.

Whether basic order picking, voice picking by zone, voice picking by wave, batch picking, multi-order, or piece picking, CTG speech-enables the warehouse and yard using the latest in voice engine technology. Voice synthesis is designed by using actual human voices in many available languages. Recognition techniques used in today’s voice picking systems yield near perfect accuracy regardless of the noise conditions. In addition, no operator voice training is required!

With over 40 years of IT experience, you can trust CTG to deliver IT consulting services and mobile systems that yield a rapid return on investment, ROI.

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Speech-Enable Your Software Application!

admin — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 14:01:52 +0000

By Becoming a CTG Value Added Reseller

Add Voice Technology to your software application or system. CTG’s Vulcan Voice Technology is easily embedded into desktop or mobile applications running Windows operating systems. As described by the architectural diagram, Vulcan Voice can be used as an API to allow your application to “speak” and to “listen” with all of the rich features found in Vulcan Voice such as speaker independence, device independence and adaptable noise filtering.

Vulcan Voice is CTG's application programming interface, or API designed to speech-enable any solution. The client system can be any mobile device with a sound card running Windows Mobile, Windows CE, XP Embedded, XP or Vista.

Whether you are a developer or a manager looking for an easy and inexpensive way to add voice technology to a new or existing application, contact CTG to request a FREE Vulcan Voice evaluation kit. The evaluation kit includes complete installation instructions, a sample open source application written in C# .NET for Visual Studio 2005, the Vulcan Voice API manual, and the voice tools required to demonstrate voice technology.

Once you see how little effort is required to speech-enable an application written in C# .NET, VB .NET, C++, C, VB and more, you’ll want to join our team and become a Value Added Reseller, or VAR, of Vulcan Voice Technology. As a Value Added Reseller, you are eligible for all of the benefits of a CTG partnership for voice and multimodal mobile offerings. CTG offers training, consulting, and customer support for our partners throughout the project development lifecycle, from prototyping to deployment.

To get started, please contact one of our representatives today!

– Click here to contact a CTG consultant >>

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Getting a Return on Your RFID Investment, Radio Frequency Identification

admin — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 14:00:36 +0000

RFID, Radio Frequency Identification, dates back to the World War II era, when it was used to differentiate between Allied and enemy aircraft. Not until the 1970s and 1980s did widespread commercial application of RFID take hold. Such systems as highway toll collection, cattle tagging, and infant abduction protection in hospitals started the worldwide trend toward RFID. Today, companies such as Wal-Mart and Target have mandated RFID use for the movement of inventory through their distribution systems. For nearly five years many vendors of these large department stores have complied with the manadates by implementing RFID. Yet, the cost of tagging the inventory has resulted in reduced vendor profits instead of delivering the promised benefit to the bottom line. So, is there a way to realize a return on investment from incorporating an RFID system in your facility?

The tagging of assets, pallets, and cases has become standard practice in supply chain execution. Although the holy grail of RFID is to tag at the “eaches” level, the high cost of disposable passive tags is still too high to realize a return on investment. Tagging each item on the grocer’s shelves, for example, would be cost prohibitive.

For large, rigid asset tags, the prevention of tote, pallet, and cart loss has proved to be the best case for a rapid return on investment. ROI of less than 18 months is not unusual.

For printed tags or small disposable tags used at the case level, return on investment has proven elusive for adding what amounts to an expensive method of bar code scanning. However, when an RFID system is designed from the outset in a multimodal fashion, using all of the available peripherals of the mobile device that acquires the RFID and other inventory control data, a rapid ROI, often less than a year, can be expected.

Consider a multimodal system that incorporates RFID to confirm location and to track cases, voice technology to direct the worker and to accept work acknowledgments, and bar code scanning for instances when serial numbers, UPCs, or other long strings of digits are to be collected. Multimodal systems take more consulting and design up front, but save significant time and resources in the long term.

At CTG we provide multimodal software and solutions for supply chain tasks from pick, place and put operations to inventory counts, inspection and maintenance activities.

– Click here to contact a CTG consultant >>

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How Vulcan Voice Works

admin — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 21:42:51 +0000

Vulcan Voice is made up of two main components: the text-to-speech (TTS) and the speech recognition (SR) modules.

Text-To-Speech:

The TTS converts work instructions from the database or other source into spoken voice prompts at the speaker or headset output.

Step 1. The database provides a work instruction and passes the text to Vulcan Voice TTS

Step 2. The Vulcan Voice TTS module converts the text into human sounding phonetics

Step 3. The mobile device's audio output plays the human quality speech

Voice Sample Text: “Voice enabling an Enterprise is typically done within the warehouse, stockyard or manufacturing environment for pick, place, put and other inventory and maintenance related operations.”

US English Male Voice:

Get Flash to see this player.

Speech Recognition:

The SR module takes a worker’s spoken responses from a microphone and converts them to data that can be updated in the database.

Step 1. A person speaks into the mobile device headset microphone

Step 2. The Vulcan Voice SR module converts the captured sound waves into text

Step 3. The mobile device delivers the returned text to the database

Speech Recognition Demonstration:
A warehouse voice picking application using Vulcan Voice

US English Female Voice:

Get Flash to see this player.

Other Voice Samples:

These samples are streams of text converted to human quality sounding voices specially compressed for use in mobile devices.

English UK Female

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Spanish Male

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Spanish Female

Get Flash to see this player.

French Canadian Male

Get Flash to see this player.

French Female

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Japanese Female

Get Flash to see this player.

Languages Available Include:

US English (ENU)
US Spanish (SPM)
Canadian French (FRC)
Brazilian Portuguese (PTB)
German (GED)
Bi-lingual German (GED / ENG support)
European French (FRF)
UK English (ENG)
Italian (ITI)
European Spanish (SPE)
Dutch (DUN)
Flemish (DUB)
European Portuguese (PTP)
Swedish (SWE)
Polish (POL)
Czech (CZE)
Russian (RUR)
Basque (BAE)
Turkish (TUT)
Australian English (ENA)
Japanese (JPJ)
Mandarin Chinese (MNC)
Cantonese (CAH)
Korean (KOK)

* To listen to samples above, click on the play arrow.

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Multimodal Mobile Computing

admin — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 12:07:03 +0000

CTG provides expertise in multimodal mobile computing systems. Our industry-proven methodologies, system development and integration services help those in Supply Chain Management across industries reduce costs and increase productivity. So, what is multimodal mobile computing and how does it work?

Multimodal mobile computing starts with a handheld computer that is capable of using multiple peripherals simultaneously. Devices such as those manufactured by CTG partners Intermec and Symbol (Motorola) are examples of rugged mobile devices with numerous available peripherals. Such peripherals include radio frequency identification (RFID), global positioning systems (GPS), barcode scanners, Bluetooth technology, Voice technology such as CTG’s Vulcan Voice, database connectivity and more. When coupled with software applications capable of multimodal input and output, the result can be a very powerful cost reducing system.

For example, distributors and manufacturers have been using barcode scanner-based systems for years. Although the mobile devices may be capable of far more than just the single task, devices are still used for one operation: barcode scanning. But, what if your company could leverage these powerful devices for more than just one operation?

The same device that is currently doing just one task with the barcode scanner can be leveraged to do many tasks. A department store clerk can use the same mobile device for shelf replenishment, cycle counting, taking inventories, reporting DOA product or communicating with representatives on the other side of the store. The systems can even guide a worker by voice synthesis and voice recognition technologies.

At CTG we provide multimodal software and solutions for supply chain tasks from pick, place and put operations to inventory counts, inspection and maintenance activities.

– Click here to contact a CTG consultant >>

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CTG, Mobilizing the Workforce, Leading by Consulting

admin — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 17:23:38 +0000

With the release of each successive generation of mobile computer, the devices continue to grow dramatically in performance as the form factor and price slowly shrink. The promise of moving the workforce out from behind a desk and out in front of the business-task at hand without losing connectivity to our critical online business systems has arrived. As presented by Gartner at their 2007 conference, companies that deploy mobile business systems to their entire field workforce will realize an estimated 2% improvement in their operational margin. In coming years, adoption of mobile technologies will be a key factor to increasing productivity and remaining competitive.

Today, multimodal mobile technology is capable of providing voice-guided work instruction, GPS, barcode scanning, RFID and network connectivity for use in all areas of supply chain execution. Also available are mobile tools for automatic software updating, broadcast messaging, email, local intranet, the Internet, Bluetooth and phone service which can be added to most any mobile application. Advancements in rapid software development tools make investing in enterprise-wide mobility cost effective. Such systems allow tremendous flexibility to transform otherwise disconnected resources into a highly productive mobile workforce.

CTG consultants know how to mobilize a workforce. Over 40 years of consulting and systems integration experience gives CTG a unique perspective in the ever evolving mobile computing marketplace. By isolating the business processes that demand mobility with a focus on return on investment (ROI) strategies, CTG guides its clients from analysis, functional specification, detailed design, integration and complete migration ensuring a clear path to improvements in process including cost, quality, flexibility, cycle time, throughput, accuracy and overall productivity.

The first step to improving any business process is to analyze it in order to identify, document and understand the various activities, procedural relationships and critical metrics. CTG does this analysis, using our industry proven methodologies, by providing visibility into process bottlenecks, boundaries and interrelationships to discover areas of improvement to develop and nurture an enterprise’s competitiveness. Would you like to improve your supply chain execution?

– Click here to contact a CTG consultant >>

* CTG specializes in mobile connectivity to ERP systems leveraging SQL Server, Oracle, SAP and more.

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Are Speech Engines Enough to Implement Today’s Mobile Voice Technology?

admin — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 13:50:35 +0000

Successfully implementing a Voice Recognition (VR) system in mobile devices, isn’t always as easy as connecting a COTS speech engine to a user interface. Even though VR technology has been around for many years, its mediocre performance has mobile users still relying heavily on their keypads. However, systems employing quite accurate mobile VR technology are now layering sophisticated algorithms on top of the VR engine to add key features like ambient and impulse noise immunity, and voice-band conversational filtering, to increase VR accuracy. Software that adds value to speech engines provides a complete voice solution and these are being increasingly implemented in mobiles to make voice technology dependable in virtually any environment. So, what are the differences between implementing complete voice solutions versus speech engines alone?

– Read the rest of the article as featured in TechLinks magazine >>

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