Customer Spotlight — Swiss Federal Railways: Mobile Track and Trace with Scandit

Barcodes have been transforming the logistics industry for over 40 years, and this continues today as smartphone-based barcode scanning technology ushers in a new era of advanced data capture and enterprise efficiency for logistics professionals. In this week’s customer spotlight, we take a look at how Swiss Federal Railways is using Scandit technology to streamline tracking processes across Switzerland’s 5,124 km railroad network.

Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) is the national railway company of Switzerland, transporting over 366 million passengers every year. With an operating income of more than 8.5 billion CHF and over 31,000 railway employees, SBB isn’t just the largest travel and transport company in Switzerland, it’s also one of the country’s largest employers.

SBB’s Company Mail Department is responsible for the pickup and delivery of all internal shipments as they move across the railway system, ensuring quality control and overall customer satisfaction when transporting goods. SBB needed a more efficient and cost-effective way to track internal mail, packages, pallets and customer luggage throughout their system. Like many businesses, they had traditionally used dedicated barcode scanners to track and trace deliveries traveling by train or truck, but SBB’s dedicated scanning devices were often broken, hard to maintain and required employees to carry multiple devices to fulfill all their daily tasks in the workplace. Trying to solve this problem, and embrace a more efficient and future-proof solution, SBB decided to invest in smartphone-based barcode scanning which presented greater functionality at a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) compared with dedicated barcode scanners.

When SBB began the search for the perfect track and trace solution they knew they needed something that was easy to configure, fast to implement and integrated with their existing, custom IT system. Most importantly however, the solution had to deliver a robust, accurate barcode scanning experience that provided performance equal to the dedicated barcode scanners they wanted to replace—especially in challenging conditions such as low-lighting and glare. Short of creating a custom mobile application that would take many months of software development and upfront resources, only one solution stood up to the challenge: Scandit Flow. With its enterprise-grade scanning performance, out-of-the-box barcode scanning workflows and cloud services for custom workflows and enterprise IT integration, it was the perfect fit for all their needs.

“Scandit Flow streamlined our tracking processes by seamlessly integrating with our existing IT system and ensuring deliveries can accurately be managed and traced throughout our network from a single device—freeing us from our reliance on dedicated barcode scanners.”
-Conradin Lietha Project Manager, SBB

Today, SBB benefits from a mobile workforce that is able to scan and track Company Mail deliveries throughout the rail network using smartphones. With Scandit Flow, SBB has successfully increased employee productivity, lowered its IT costs and replaced dedicated scanners with an enterprise mobility strategy that will allow them to track and trace deliveries for years to come.

To learn more about SBB and their mobile track and trace success, download our customer case study.