Casio and Hand Held Products provide German Rail with e-ticket processing

Portable data terminals now offer required high-performance when reading any kind of ticket.

October 06, 2006 - Hand Held Products, the global leader in image-based data collection solutions, and CASIO Europe, have teamed up to provide German Rail with a new imaging-based solution for processing e-tickets. German Rail, Europe's largest railway, has implemented a new ticket and mobile ticket system using Casio's IT-3000 mobile computer powered by Adaptus™ Imaging Technology 5.0.

Prior to deploying this new solution, German Rail conductors were forced to manually type in a 16-digit ticket number whenever a home-printed ticket (or e-ticket) was presented. Recently, the railway experienced exponential growth in e-ticketing, and currently processes over 50,000 e-tickets per day.

More than 12,000 CASIO IT-3000's are being delivered via Systemtechnik, a German company that helped develop the product. The project was won after an EU-wide public tender. A result of close cooperation between CASIO Europe and Siemens VDO, the new IT-3000's will handle the mobile ticket sales as well as provide an easy way to read and validate train tickets. Systemtechnik's built-in SmartCard technology enables the conductors to receive secure payment via credit cards, as well as quickly and easily read and validate the many different ticket varieties, including e-tickets, of its many thousands of daily passengers.

"We required a solution that enabled our conductors to sell and print tickets on the train, receive secure payments, and quickly read and validate train tickets with an Aztec barcode - home printed and at a later stage from an electronic display. This required not only an update to our existing hardware, but also an update to the technology behind the e-tickets we offer to our customers," said Patrick Neehuis, project manager of 'Mobile Terminal 2' at German Rail.

"Hand Held Products was an integral partner in providing German Rail with a solution optimized for their requirements," said Thomas Uppenkamp, sales manager of CASIO's Industrial Solutions Division. "Their expertise in applying imaging technology to data collection applications combined with our best-in-class mobile computing terminal enabled us to provide German Rail with a market-leading solution."

"German Rail is an excellent example of an enterprise that is in tune with the demands of its customers - they have revolutionized their passenger ticketing process in order to give the customer the best experience possible," said Roel Vreeburg, senior vice president international sales, marketing and services for Europe & Asia at Hand Held Products. "Together with CASIO, we provided a solution that allows German Rail meet the demands of the market today, and to adapt to future applications including reading mobile ticket bar codes from mobile phone or PDA displays."
 

Adaptus Imaging Technology 5.0

The philosophy behind Adaptus Imaging Technology 5.0 is a commitment to delivering an optimized combination of performance and versatility, providing customers with a solution that offers a superior value.

The high performance of Adaptus Imaging Technology 5.0 delivers aggressive read rates and depths of field on linear, 2D, PDF417, stacked linear, and matrix bar codes. This aggressiveness applies even in challenging reading environments where lighting conditions might be difficult and barcodes are of poor quality. High performance and aggressive behavior over a broad range of targets and environments deliver the most important benefit: product ease of use in many bar code reading applications. The buying agent and end user does not need to wonder if the Adaptus 5.0 reader will do the job as conditions (bar code density, ambient light, and required depth of field) change. They can just be confident that it works.