Transforming inCab mobility with the Samsung Tab Active 3 By Geotab

>> Hello, everyone, and welcome. My name is Calvin Rarie, and I am a Sales Enablement Trainer with Samsung's Mobile B2B Division. With me today is Ken Currie, Vice President of Business Development at Barcoding, Inc. Today we're going to have a discussion based around our two companies to get a little bit of background about both Samsung and Barcoding, Inc. as well as talk about the customer experience for purchasing Samsung devices and how Barcoding, Inc. can help you in that regard.

With that in mind, Ken, how are you doing today? >> Never better, Calvin. How are you? >> I'm doing fantastic. So, Ken, I wanted to go ahead and jump on in into this discussion and get started with a pretty basic question. Could you give us a little bit of background on Barcoding, Inc. and your Geotab Marketplace offering? >> Sure, Calvin.

Barcoding, Inc. is a supply-chain system and mobile hardware systems integrator. We've been in business for 23 years, and we've deployed hundreds of thousands of mobile devices for thousands of customers. We maintain physical offices in the US and Canada. We have seven of them today, and that allows us to support our customers locally in English, in French.

It allows us to avoid cross-border shipping challenges and allows us also... We have deployment centers on both the East Coast and the West Coast of both countries, which allows us to provide great shipping options but also a follow-the-Sun model for help-desk support. So our Mobile Pie offering is essentially a hardware-and-support package that we provide to Geotab resellers. It combines best-in-class hardware and mounting systems along with deployment and presales deployment in StayLive Services. These are really world-class services.

We call them Mobile Pie because they have all of the ingredients that you need to support your customers. >> Wonderful. Speaking of in-cab because I know you mentioned that very briefly, could you tell us when and why you decided to standardize on Samsung products for your in-cab mobility platform? >> Sure, Calvin. We made the shift to Samsung about 4 years ago for fleet customers. Prior to that pivot, we allowed partners and customers to choose the hardware platforms that they wanted to use, and with the move from legacy screens, proprietary devices like Micronet and LIlliput to BYOD, we found that many fleet customers went on the cheap side.

Well, the downside to that was downtime, and when we moved to Samsung, in year one, we reduced our tickets, our hardware tickets and RMAs by about 90 percent, so we realized that we were doing a disservice to our customers with all of the optionality, and a number of which are global transportation providers, so in order to manage risk and build standard, repeatable processes, we downselected on Samsung and have been that way really ever since. I think everyone is familiar with Samsung, Calvin, but could you tell us about your division and detail Samsung's product development in the rugged-enterprise space? >> Absolutely, Ken, so our B2B division is of course... We're focused on creating solutions for customers of any size, scale or industry, and we've had a lot of traction in our recent years for our flagship devices like the Note series, the S series of devices, but we also wanted to enter into the rugged space. Now historically rugged devices have been overengineered, overrugged and a lot of times overly expensive, sometimes costing multiple thousands of dollars per device for deployment. What we wanted to do when we set out to enter the rugged-enterprise market is to design devices for the frontline workers that make sense for the frontline workers, meaning our design philosophy was built on the feedback from those workers, and we used that information to create our devices, so with that in mind, we wanted to create rugged devices that could withstand the beatings of everyday work environments while also being cost-effective for business to deploy because a lot of the times when you talk about workers needing rugged devices, those overly expensive devices mean not everyone will get one, and because of that, you'll see instances of people having them, but there's also going to be instances of those workers waiting to get those devices, and that creates unacceptable workflow interruptions.

So with that in mind, our rugged portfolio began with the Galaxy Tab Active2, and that was a smashing success, and what we wanted to do was take that success and build on it, and that's what happened with the Tab Active Pro in 2019, so for 2019, we introduced the Tab Active Pro, and this device built off the success of the Tab Active 2 by being bigger and better in just about every way. We included the S-Pen like normal. We improved the battery size, the screen size, and we started introducing new features like the programmable keys because a lot of our customers wanted to be able to touch a button and open their driver logs, their barcode-scanning inventory-management screens or what have you at the touch of a button, and ever since then, that's also been introduced on future models like the XCover FieldPro, which was launched for AT&T's FirstNet program for first responders, and then later we introduced in 2020 as well the XCover Pro, which is an arrier-agnostic version of the FieldPro, and the idea was we wanted to create not only rugged tablets but also rugged handheld device. In this case, we chose the form and functionality of a smartphone, and we did that because we found customers, in this case the frontline workers, had a fantastic response to smartphones because most people use them, and so when you marry form and functionality like that, you tend to get great adoption rates, and you also get a great usage of the devices that a lot of times when you put a rugged handheld computer in someone's hands, it tends to be bulky and unfamiliar-feeling, and if it's unfamiliar-feeling, people tend not to use it if they can avoid it. So in this case, we took all the design information.

We came to the XCover Pro, and then all this information, all this buildup and all this design philosophy has culminated in the Galaxy Tab Active3, which was launched this year. >> Could you tell us a little bit more about the Galaxy Tab Active3, Calvin? What's the ideal customer profile for this device? >> Sure, Ken, so the Tab Active3 has a lot going for it, and I'm going to be kind of brief on the features on it because there's a lot to talk about it, and I'm going to frame this in the mind of a typical vertical that we look at for the Galaxy Tab Active3, and in this case, we're going to talk about transportation logistics. So let's bear in mind who the typical person is that's actually going to be using the Tab Active3 in transportation, and we're of course talking about the truck driver, so typically a truck driver is doing one of two things, that they're either entering and exiting the cab whenever they arrive to the site to drop off their materials, or they're in the cab for a long haul in between their individual sites. With that in mind, you have to think about all the different temperature ranges and environments that the driver's going to find themselves in, and if they're in it, then the Tab Active3 is going to be in it, too. So let's say the driver is climbing out of the cab, and they're exiting, and they drop the device.

Well, a normal tablet would break and would be unusable, but the Tab Active3 enjoys a fantastic shock-drop test and defense. It also is military-grade rugged, so if it's good enough for the military, it's probably good enough for a truck driver, and we've really put a massive emphasis on making sure the Tab Active3 isn't just rough, but it's also efficient and robust enough that if it does drop, it doesn't full-stop the device or interrupt how the device is working, and they can simply pick it up and go, and a lot of the times once they've exited the cabs, they're going to be in all types of temperature ranges from very hot to very cold, and it works in all these different temperature areas, including, for instance, say a walk-in cooler. They need to be able to bring in the Tab Active3 because they're dropping off refrigerated materials, and not only does it work in those cool areas, but if you walk into a cooler, you're probably going to have condensation on the screen. Typically you would need to wipe it off to be able to use it, but the Tab Active3 does enjoy things like the Glove Mode and the Wet Mode, so not only does it work when there's condensation or even water on the screen, but it will also work with gloves because, COVID aside, a lot of truck drivers do use gloves every day because they're handling materials all the time, and it will continue to work even while you're using the gloves on there. Now, on top of that, we also improved the battery features, so not only does it have an incredibly powerful battery that lasts a long time, but there's also something really exciting for Tab Active3 that I want to talk about, and it's really cool for the transportation industry, and that's No Battery mode.

A lot of times what we found is cab drivers complained about the device, in this case the tablets, are overheating in the cab because they may be left in the cab for a long time. They're in the sun while they're charging, and the battery is usually the source of overheating, so what we did is we removed the problem, which was the battery, and we introduced No Battery Mode, and the concept is, once you have the tablet, the Tab Active3, plugged in into the cab, you can remove the battery, and it will keep running, so that removes any really major chance of the device overheating and becoming unusable while the customer is... in this case, the frontline worker is using the device. Now all that's backed up by the concept of making sure we have the best possible device for the customer and for the business themselves, so enterprises, they want program stability. They want product stability.

They want to make sure that their devices are not only going to last a long time and withstand a beating, but they're going to be backed up by great stability in both hardware support and security software support, so the Tab Active3 is going to be around for a long time, and it's going to enjoy software support even further beyond that, so the ideal customer, really I know I pointed out transportation logistics, just about everyone that could use a rugged tablet, and on top of that, these are customers that want stability, and they want to have ease of mind that their investment is not only going to last the use of their frontline workers but also that their investment is going to last for years to come. So, Ken, now that we've discussed our backgrounds and histories of our companies, I'd like to talk more about Geotab if you don't mind. So let me know, does Barcoding, Inc. currently work with Geotab resellers today, and out of curiosity, what is the ideal reseller partner for Barcoding, Inc. 's Mobile Pie offering? >> Sure, Calvin.

We work with a couple of the largest Geotab resellers in North America, and it's really not size that's the key criteria for us. It's culture and values, so our ideal reseller partner typically has two main qualities. The first: They are obsessed with the customer experience that they deliver, and for this kind of reseller, we may provide a white-labeled help desk on a tier-two basis. It could be 24 by 7. It may be something different.

We may package the tablets and mounting devices along with harnesses and GO devices for them in labeled kits with their logos and labeled by customer VIN and location ID. There's another type of reseller that we really gel with, and these are folks that are constantly looking for an edge to increase their odds of winning and keeping customers. They will control all the variables that they can. They may have the mantra similar to Dwight Eisenhower of plans are nothing, and planning is everything, so for these type of resellers, we may help them in the presales process in response to RFPs and proposals. We may give white-glove collaboration on pilots and proof of concepts and participate in their project management and deployment calls.

We may be stocking equipment specifically for them to get ahead of lead times or to support specific enterprise customers. >> So speaking of maintaining an edge, can you let me know how Barcoding differentiates as a managed services provider? >> Sure, well, managed service provider is kind of a buzzword compliance term here in IT. How we do it is, it's simple. It's people, process and technology, so we have a 150-person organization in seven offices in two countries with one mission, and from a process perspective, we utilize best practices that really come from lessons learned over 23 years and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of devices that we've deployed and that we support. From a technology perspective, we've developed tools like our Boss platform, it's really needed for multilocation, multicustomer asset management.

So let me give you a view on what Boss looks like and why service providers need a tool like this, which is something that comes standard with our Mobile Pie offering. So in this demo instance, Universal Technologies is a fictitious Geotab reseller, and they're utilizing boss to manage mobile assets, so you see about 1,100 mobile assets over 15 locations and which could be customer locations in the US and Canada. Every part of this is drill down. All of the locations and all of the fields can be drilled down for filtering and exporting in further detail. But we'll just take a global view of devices here, and of those 1,100-some devices, you can see how they... where they're at, right? So this is not a MDM tool, but it's a visualization and a management tool allowing an administrator to orchestrate support, so here we have six devices in stock, 1,000 plus that are field-deployed, 11 in spare pool, 10 in transit and 82 that are being repaired, right? You can imagine these numbers become... in the management challenge becomes greater when you're talking 10,000 devices or even more, in fact, probably would need to... We like to keep a spare pool up by... to about somewhere between two to five percent for reseller partners, especially in the United States where we're managing around the FMCSA 8-day rule for systems, right? So without an EAM tool like this, it's really hard for your team or for your customer to manage all of their mobile devices in the field, the status and the build and how many they have to deploy, redeploy and repair, and if they're doing it, they're doing it generally by spreadsheet and e-mail and not very well.

These are the kinds of things that we bring to bear for our Mobile Pie reseller partners. So, Calvin, we just showed Boss, which is a tool we use for asset management. We also use Samsung Knox for configuration and device management. Can you tell the audience a little bit about Knox as a tool? >> Sure, absolutely, so Samsung Knox, we could be here all day talking about it, so I'm going to keep this relatively brief on what Samsung Knox is at a top level. So it comes in two components, and the first is hardware, and the hardware side is, we have built into our rugged devices and our flagship devices secure chip sets, which protect the device against intrusions, attacks and all other kinds of malfeasance, so that's at the hardware level.

At the software level, more to what you're asking about, Ken, is we have our Samsung Knox Suite, which does everything from deployment to configuration to device management for helping customers with limited IT resources be able to configure their devices remotely, lock out devices that were stolen or lost and also of course keep those devices as secure as possible. So we offer these because, again, we recognize that there are companies where they have limited IT resources, and they need a hand in making sure that when they buy our devices, they can use them to their fullest potential. Now Samsung Knox, of course, is only one part of this journey for the customer, and like you mentioned, this is something that Barcoding, Inc. uses, so I'm curious, Ken, to know what other methodologies does Barcoding, Inc. use in order to extend the usable life of the devices for our customers.

>> Sure, Calvin. It starts with presales consultation. We want to make sure the customers get the right device for their use case. Something that we didn't talk about was really the environmental benefits of the Tab Active3, so customers are operating with very extreme temperatures on the cold and on the hot side are prime candidates for something like the Tab Active3, but going back 4 years when we made the pivot to Samsung, we have customers that are still using those same tablets today. A lot of that reason has to do with how we mounted them.

We find that the... and have found that the charging ports for tablets are really the first physical-layer thing to wear out, so we use pogo-pin-based charging setups, and we wire that mount directly to the fuse box. For use cases that require a lot of hands-on for the device, taking it in and out of the cab, things like bill-of-lading scanning or customer proof of delivery, we go with a quick-release doc. On a postsales basis, we develop a StayAlive program that's fit to purpose and fit to win for the reseller. Some resellers want us to stock equipment for them and provide an advanced exchange service so that we can handle RMA and repair work in advance of the device coming back to us, and then for other resellers with mission-critical customers, we provide even on-site support for things as mundane as screen cracking, so it's really designed for the reseller and the end user in mind.

While hardware is easy to buy, it's not easy to deploy or manage, but working with Barcoding, Inc. and with Samsung, we will help you to win more deals, to remove risk from customer deployments and to keep your customers happy, in compliance and connected. Now Calvin and I will be available to answer questions. Thanks for participating.

Source : Geotab