“It’s easy for people to feel that you’re criticizing the old and that’s rarely helpful,” Gustafsson says. “You make sure you recognize all the good stuff and how you can leverage that good stuff to be successful in the new area. But you must also create a case for why the change is required and why you can’t achieve your aspirations by just doing the same things that you did historically.”
The core of what Zebra wanted to do was use its extensive portfolio of barcode, receipt, kiosk and radio-frequency identification printers and supplies and develop real-time location solutions to give a digital voice to assets, people and transactions.
“It provides the ability to customers to make smarter and timelier decisions to make their business more efficient,” he says.
“You scan a barcode and you know something about that asset. With other technologies like passive or active Global Positioning System, we can really start having dynamic visibility about what the asset is, where it is and its condition.”
Gustafsson felt a two-pronged approach was needed. Zebra had established itself as a premium brand, but he wanted a strategy to expand share in the low-end market as well.
“We came out with a number of new products that were in emerging markets to engage much more aggressively on the home turf of the low-end competitors,” Gustafsson says. “The goal was to make sure they didn’t have a profit where they could grow and then reinvest that in solutions or geographic expansion that would have more of an impact on us.”
On the high-end side, Zebra took a hard look at developing more software and working with software vendors to develop applications and then expand the value of those applications.
“It’s easy to stub your toe and do things that set you back,” he says. “For us, one thing that we focused on was to make sure that the organization knows that the customer is our true compass. The customer is true north. It’s hard to argue with what the customer wants and you focus on what’s happening outside of the company and in the marketplace.
“That way you can start to understand the trends that are going on around you. When you get a better understanding of the external environment and what the customer really wants, it makes it a lot easier to get the rest of the organization to buy in and understand it.”
Limitless potential
It’s easy to get lost in technospeak these days when considering what businesses in the tech sector are trying to do. But Gustafsson says there are real-world applications for what Zebra is working on that anyone can understand.
“The next piece is going to be much more machine-to-machine,” Gustafsson says. “It’s much more focused on if all things have the capability to be connected to the Internet and communicate something about themselves, what can you now do?”
He uses the example of fruits and vegetables often going bad because the environment they are in during storage or transport is not the right temperature. Add a thermostat that is connected by radio-frequency identification and you now have the ability to track in real time the status of your produce.
“You’re a grocer and you’re shipping tomatoes from Mexico to the U.S. to sell them as fresh tomatoes,” Gustafsson says. “You realize after 100 miles that the temperature has been too high and they’re no longer fresh tomatoes. Now you divert it to a ketchup plant. You turn the truck around and minimize waste and become much more efficient.”
Perhaps the ketchup example is a bit of a stretch, but the point is made: The ability to obtain and process data is only going to grow.
