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By Jeffery Stark | Jan. 27, 2026
From Hours to Minutes: Solving Retail IT Issues Faster, Together
Picture this: it is the peak of the holiday shopping season. Every register has a long line, associates race to fulfill online orders, and the stockroom buzzes with activity. Suddenly, a handheld scanner in a key department stops working. The frontline associate feels stranded.
The IT help desk ticket describes a device failure. But is it? The network team sees clean traffic logs. The device management team sees a healthy device. The minutes tick by, sales hang in the balance, and the customer experience starts to degrade. The all-too-common IT blame game begins.
This scenario plays out in retail environments every day. In a world of complex, multi-vendor technology stacks, the root cause of a problem often hides in the gaps between systems. Finding the source requires visibility, collaboration, and a new way of thinking about the data your operations generate. It requires a truly connected frontline.
From Siloed Data to a Single Source of Truth
For decades, organizations viewed their networks and their endpoint devices as separate domains. This separation creates operational friction. When a critical tool like a Zebra scanner goes offline, the time spent figuring out why often exceeds the time it takes to fix it.
We believe there’s a better way. This vision requires a foundation for intelligent operations where data flows freely between systems to provide real-time insight and foster connected collaboration. It means designing hardware, software, and automation solutions for the connected frontline that do more than just perform a task; they provide crucial intelligence about the operational environment.
This philosophy of building a leading ecosystem focused on customer commitment drives our relentless pursuit of innovation. The goal remains simple: make work better every day for organizations, their employees, and those they serve by creating optimized workflows.
A Partner’s Perspective on Unifying the View
This theoretical solution comes to life in a powerful story recently shared by our partners at Cisco. In their blog post, “Sarah Saves the Season,” they illustrate the power of this integrated approach perfectly.
They tell the story of a network administrator, Sarah, who faces the exact scenario we described. During a holiday rush, multiple Zebra devices go offline. Instead of a multi-team war room and a lengthy investigation, Sarah uses her Cisco Meraki dashboard, which now natively integrates analytics from Zebra devices.
In a single pane of glass, she sees the scanners connect, drop, and then identify the source: a misconfigured switch port. The problem gets identified and fixed in minutes, not hours. The blame game never even starts.
Turning Insight into Intelligent Action
Sarah’s story demonstrates the future of frontline operations – a future that is digitized, automated, and intelligent. The Zebra scanner did more than just capture a barcode; it provided the asset visibility and device diagnostics that, when combined with Cisco’s network infrastructure, created a powerful, problem-solving engine. This is what we mean when we talk about creating data-powered environments.
With decades of market leadership in data capture solutions, Zebra understands that our customers' success depends on the entire operational chain. By engineering our devices to function as part of a broader solution ecosystem, we help customers move beyond simple data collection and toward intelligent automation. This collaborative approach provides the clarity needed to keep the frontline, and the business, moving at full speed.
The challenges of modern retail demand more than just best-in-class hardware. They demand a holistic approach that connects people, assets, and workflows. We feel proud to work with organizations like Cisco to deliver on that vision.
