Microscan : Integrating technology through smarter way

Q. Microscan is one of the leading providers of machine vision products and has significant market share in the industry. How has Microscan managed this growth?

Microscan’s 30-year legacy of innovation has contributed much to the history of auto ID and machine vision technology. Compact size, high performance, ease of use, and scalability have been the driving objectives of Microscan engineering. This focus has yielded revolutions in the mechanical design of scanners and cameras for small integration spaces. In 1982, Microscan miniaturized barcode reading devices with the invention of the world’s first laser diode barcode scanner, and then miniaturized codes with the invention of the high-capacity, highly-reliable Data Matrix symbol in 1994. With the release of its new MicroHAWK® Barcode Readers in 2015, Microscan proved that size did not limit device capability, offering hundreds of possible configuration options (decoder type, lens, speed, sensor, and lighting) on the smallest industrial imaging platform available for integration into machines and instruments. MicroHAWK is accompanied by the WebLink user interface – the first barcode reader interface accessible via web browser – which greatly simplifies usability and accessibility of devices for barcode reading.

World firsts in the evolution of machine vision technology can also be traced to Microscan’s history: the first graphical user interface for machine vision software (Itran, 1982), the first vision-guided robotics with integrated machine vision (Automatix, 1983), and the first PC-based machine vision system (Automatix, 1987), all of which established a foundation for modern vision systems. In 2011, Microscan launched the AutoVISION® product suite, representing the convergence of the company’s barcode and machine vision legacies on one camera platform. This platform introduced the concept of “Auto ID+”, which is a technology capable of barcode reading plus simple machine vision tasks such as counting, measurement, presence/absence, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

According to Microscan President Scott Summerville, “We continue to observe a trend toward the ‘flattening’ of the industrial automation architecture, enabling manufacturers to do more with less. Like the evolution of cell phones to smart phones, the evolution of barcode imagers and PC-based machine vision cameras to smart cameras is yielding single solutions with unlimited application potential. These smart cameras have the ability to offer what were once thought of as independent technologies on a single, all-in-one platform.”

Q. What is the overall outlook for Microscan? Please brief us about Microscan’s global and domestic presence.

Microscan products are represented and supported through a global network of partners and system integration companies who specialized in automation solutions. The network includes more than 300 top automation integrators and value-added resellers in over 30 industrialized countries, with technology specialization in specific sub-channels and complementary product lines.

Microscan has been growing at a consistent pace since its establishment in 1982 and has made significant inroads in recent years into unchartered regions like Sri Lanka and Pakistan where we are observing very promising trends in technology implementation. India has provided incremental growth year over year for Microscan. The investment strategy for Microscan continues to be both in domestic technology acquisition to expand the breadth of synergistic technologies that enable our customers to integrate all-in-one data acquisition, control, and analysis. Globally, Microscan is invested in being closer to our customers where they are developing solutions.

Microscan continues to grow both its field sales, applications, and distribution channel resources throughout Asia-Pacific as we continue to identify needs for more personalized support in integrating industrial automation across the market.

Q. How about Microscan’s initiatives in the industrial automation space? Which are your focus areas?

In developing the future’s industrial automation solutions, we are acutely aware of the need to support the coming Industrial Internet of Things with easily-integrated, easily-configured solutions. Our technology is founded on the acquisition of data by laser scanning and imaging technology. Our software has reinforced the autonomy of these “sensing” devices by giving machines the ability to make conclusions about data and communicate this data to other systems. We are now looking at data analysis as the final ingredient needed to create industrial automation systems that are not only able to capture data and communicate results, but make significant decisions based on data, yielding discrete, packaged automation solutions that are actually “smart” in the way that they behave, interact, and – eventually – tap into a global network. With systems like these integrated into a broader data communication network, like that ushered in by the Internet of Things, customers will be able to streamline the equipment and software necessary to compete in the connected marketplace, ensuring the ease and reliability (and therefore the continued relevance) of industrial automation.

Q. What are the market opportunities for Microscan products in India? How do you plan to position these products?

In India, Microscan has observed a number of opportunities in pharmaceuticals, FMGC, white goods and appliances, and aerospace in particular. Thanks to a very versatile portfolio that we have developed over the last three decades, Microscan is able to solve challenges in a diverse range of industries, from primary packaging to factory automation, assembly, and machining. Product identification, tracking, traceability, and guidance are enabled by our barcode reading products to ensure accurate automated operations and create auditable histories of parts manufacture in spaces like appliance assembly, aerospace parts control, and fast-moving goods tracking. Our latest LVS® inspection solutions also enable product serialization and traceability compliance verification, offering barcode quality grading to ISO/IEC, as well as data validation to GS1, HIBCC, and more – especially applicable in areas like pharmaceuticals, medical device, food & beverage, and other areas where consumer welfare is a variable. Machine vision plays an important role in all of our customers’ operations, improving visual inspection by applying tireless, precision equipment that ensures error-free operations and eliminates undue cost and waste.

Q. Can you brief us more about Microscan’s top line product range?

Microscan products aim to provide a cohesive library of hardware and software tools for solving any imagined application at any stage of industrial manufacturing or clinical automation. Both our barcode reader products and machine vision systems offer scalable software architecture, ensuring a simplified user experience from one product to the next if customers require additional hardware features or functionality. Our vision is to reduce integration complexity, time to setup, and time to train on any of our products thanks to cross-platform synergies and the flexibility to adapt using a single solution.

As an example, Microscan recently released an all new suite of flexible data acquisition and control devices through its MicroHAWK® imaging platform. Leveraging a legacy of miniaturization, leadership in high-performance decoding and inspection tools, configurability of our hardware, and simplicity of our graphical barcode and machine vision software user interfaces (AutoVISION® and WebLink), MicroHAWK leverages all of Microscan’s hardware/software options in single, scalable camera suite. As the world’s smallest smart cameras, these devices offer unlimited application potential in Microscan’s trademark miniature design with an array of hardware configurations and user-friendly software environments. Users have the freedom to select their preferred MicroHAWK unit and then factory-configure their device hardware – including integrated lighting, high-performance X-mode decoding, sensor options, industrial IP-rated sealing, liquid lens autofocus, Ethernet connectivity, and many more options – without increasing the camera’s physical footprint. The cameras also provide the user’s choice of software from among Microscan’s portfolio for barcode reading, Auto ID+, or complete machine vision, enabling a range of applications from basic to complex. This architecture consolidates equipment, integration space, and operation for barcode reading and machine vision applications, reducing the time and cost required to source, install, and learn the industry’s most powerful tools. The result is one incredible platform capable of both auto ID and machine vision technology with a common form factor, performance level, and user experience.

Q. As we know, Microscan acquired LVS (Label Vision Systems, Inc.) last year. What is the significance of acquiring LVS for Microscan?

Microscan aims to provide its customers with solutions for complete data acquisition, management, and analysis. We understand that the job isn’t over once a barcode reader or machine vision system captures information – it’s what a manufacturer can do with that information that really affects their efficiency, productivity, and bottom line. We want to build complete solutions that gather data and draw meaningful conclusions about this data for the manufacturer.

The new LVS® line of barcode verification and print quality inspection solutions have supplemented the existing Microscan product portfolio to provide a more complete solution offering from product serialization and documentation to final packaging. These products in particular cater to the full spectrum of verification requirements for the pharmaceuticals, FMCG, healthcare and medical devices, and packaging sectors.

There are many advantages to acquiring the trade and assets of LVS. The leadership team at Microscan has a strong interest in developing and investing in LVS’s technology and products to support the market, which is expanding due to regulatory trends and corporate quality initiatives. We will have the opportunity to accelerate the expansion of LVS products and solutions into key international markets, and to leverage the substantial synergies between LVS and Microscan sales, technology, and operations.

Q. Microscan has revised its vision statement to: At Microscan we will leverage our expert position to help manufacturers and labs create error-free operations via innovative track, trace, control, and analytics-driven solutions. What is the reason for updating this message?

One of our key objectives at Microscan is to become the “go-to provider” for TTCA (track, trace, control, and analysis) solutions across industrial sectors. This means understanding what the customer needs – what is going to make their operations and lives better – before they have even identified it themselves. Over the past several years, Microscan has established vertical teams to support and predict specific industry needs and invest in customer-facing personnel that are able to observe and support changes in unique markets. These investments, combined with the added expertise from our acquisition of LVS, are beginning to pay significant dividends. Many of our competitors continue to sell commodities without any deep understanding of the customer need or providing case-by-case applications assistance. Microscan, on the other hand, is utilizing an education-based, solution-selling method that drives innovation around customer pain points and adapts with customer demand.

As part of this customer focus, we realize that leading technology innovation is not sufficient for ensuring our success. We must realize the significance that the user experience plays in adopting and utilizing high-performance technology. Streamlining our innovations by combining tracking, traceability, control, and analysis onto single-platform, packaged solutions mean that customers need to do less development, integration, and training to learn to harness the power of the technology we engineer. Providing customers with raw data does not illustrate an investment in the customer challenge. We want to partner with our customers through the use of data, and the analysis of data, to solve very specific challenges and provide customers with answers not just facts.  Our solutions should offer everything a customer needs to automate critical stages of their operations without any excess effort on the customer’s part, because Microscan should play the role of the expert on the customer’s challenge and therefore the solution. This focus on customer enablement through the application of our expertise isn’t just limited to sales and applications support; it touches all of Microscan’s departments. In Microscan’s operations, we leverage our expertise to create modular solutions that can be configured to a customer’s unique application requirements quickly and easily, so solutions are always available on time. In our engineering group, we leverage our expertise to develop intuitive solutions that both simplify the user experience while meeting performance needs. In our finance department, we leverage our expertise to align our business processes to the processes of the markets we serve. In marketing, we leverage our expertise to provide educational content on current industry topics and trends white papers and webinars. In our industry-focused verticals and applications support teams, we leverage our expertise to create custom solutions and recommend best practices for deployment of our solutions.

Q. What are research and development hot spots of machine vision technology – can you analyze and forecast? What are your plans to support the India market with machine vision in the next 5 years?

Complete, autonomous automation (machine to machine or M2M manufacturing) is a growing trend that influences machine vision development. In order for machines to communicate more thoroughly without human intervention, much more R&D must be done to ensure equipment synergy. Industrial equipment manufacturers are getting closer to honing in on standard device communication protocols and integration techniques that will enable a more cohesive operational process through the universality of equipment specifications. Machine vision hardware and software must follow this unification, since it is machine vision and imaging technology that provide the “eyes” to all operational processes. As we know, robotic guidance is quite a hot topic these days, and without machine vision, a robot cannot “see” where a part is located or where it needs to go. Smart cameras are becoming increasingly adept at performing in a human-like fashion, giving robotics the eyes to perform precise operations without interference from human operators.
Currently in India, Microscan machine vision development continues to follow trends in our customer’s growth, and therefore particular industries become focus areas for our technology customization. Pharmaceuticals and the regulation of healthcare packaging have helped to drive our investment in vision solutions that utilize industry-specific quality control parameters, such as those regulated by international standards organizations. As global markets become more interconnected and physical distance becomes less relevant, however, the distinction between Microscan’s technology developments in India versus other global regions will become less significant. Instead, the development of local support personnel and personnel expertise will be the greatest investment for Microscan on a regional level. Microscan currently offers local sales, applications support, and certified resellers, who are all product integration experts with extensive training on Microscan technology. While our R&D is based in the USA, in the future, we will to add our teams in all areas of Asia-Pacific to ensure penetration into businesses to uncover R&D opportunities at the customer level. Also, we will train our partners to be equal experts in the use and integration of our technology, in order to deepen our reach into customer locations.

Q. What are the differences between India’s market and that of other countries? Based on these differences, how will Microscan promote its MicroHAWK product line? Is there a case study to share?

Although technology is converging, Microscan realizes that India is a price sensitive market with high expectations for growth. Keeping this in mind, Microscan continues to empower our local personnel to adapt services and operations to meet particular customer needs for cost-efficient products and focus on providing excellence in terms of on-time delivery and customer satisfaction. Our MicroHAWK line is a great example of Microscan’s ability to adapt to unique customer needs without sacrificing operational expectations for pricing and availability. MicroHAWK is a factory-configurable device with over 1,500 possible feature combinations to meet a vast array of customer requirements. However, MicroHAWK’s part numbers are standard in our catalog and manufacturing has been established in such a way as to provide MicroHAWK models as off-the-shelf devices to ensure on-time delivery to our customers, regardless of the unique features they require. In addition, since MicroHAWK configurations can be customized, customers in the Indian market can be assured of the optimal price-performance in every MicroHAWK unit, ensuring that the customer pays for only the features that they need, and nothing else.

Q. Please summarize the first half of 2016 and what is your expectation for the second half?

Microscan faced a challenging first half in India due to certification delays for our latest product lines. We have resolved these issues and business is once again in full swing. Our second half is looking extremely promising for the India market and we are certain that we will quickly rebuild our opportunity channel to achieve our committed output in supporting customer requirements for the remainder of the year. Our local agents have been working diligently with customers to ensure that, despite challenges, we are diligent in supporting their needs and are always available to provide critical process support and technologies to ensure their success.