December 2008

Nalco, a water treatment and process improvement company, has replaced the handheld terminals used by the field service engineers in its institutional division – but has stayed with Motorola, whose predecessor Symbol supplied its previous units.

It has also gone back to the original supplier, Spirit Data Capture, for the new devices. Previously Spirit supplied it with MC50 handheld terminals, but Nalco wanted to incorporate more features in a single device.

According to Mark James, its industry development manager for government and education in Europe: 'We were looking for a personal digital assistant that incorporated both GPRS and mobile telephony capabilities. We also wanted a solution that would integrate with our other in-house, online software products without having to synchronise everything via a PC.'

Nalco also wanted a competitive price, reliability and easy integration with its existing systems.

 

The device it has chosen is Motorola's MC35, which the maker describes as an enterprise digital assistant. Its features include mobile voice and data communications with both GSM and GPRS, plus a range of wireless networking capabilities. It also has integrated image capture and barcode scanning capabilities, and can act as a camera.

Spirit provided loan devices during the implementation process, and offered support in writing bespoke software for part of Nalco's in-house risk assessment system.