United Flower Growers Increases Accuracy By 90 Percent With Motion Tablet PCs

Located in Burnaby, British Columbia, United Flower Growers (UFG) has been a cornerstone of the floral community in the Pacific Northwest for nearly 50 years. As one of only three Dutch-style auctions left in North America, the company serves an estimated 600 customers per year, selling over 50 million stems of flowers and more than one million potted plants.

The auction process begins early in the morning when truckloads of fresh flowers and plants produced by local growers arrive at UFG's 26 loading bays. All products are visually inspected for quality before being offered for sale. Once accepted, pertinent sales data is scanned into UFG's custom-designed software using Microsoft® Windows®-based Motion® F5v Tablet PCs.

The staff uses the Motion F5v Tablet PCs to scan the barcodes, pull up the information, make any edits using drop down menus and save the changes to the database. The Motion Tablet PC-enabled process has helped dramatically reduce manual input errors by 90 percent, which translates to a considerable cost savings. UFG has also been able to reduce the time of the overall process, with the data entry now down to two and a half hours from what previously took four.