A discussion with Robert Schoenbergerof Agris-Schoen Vision Systems
VSD: What applications or industries does ASVS serve?
Schoenberger: ASVS has historically served general manufacturing markets such as automotive, electronics, and food-for example, we've installed systems to make sure products containing peanuts go in the right container and that the containers are free of print defects. When our manufacturing-sector work decreased, we increased our work with governments, the military, the US Postal Service, and homeland security, but we kept going with manufacturing, which is now starting to show improvement.
We are hoping that by having a balance of work we can more easily weather the ups and downs of any one sector. I'm surprised at the amount of manufacturing that the government/military or their contractors do beyond the obvious things like making military equipment. Printing and tamper-resistant identity documents are good examples. In addition, OCR [optical character recognition], for example on mail, is very similar to OCR done for manufacturers. And, with mail there is a need to network significant numbers of computers and pass a substantial number of images across that network in an environment that is rugged and where the system cannot go down.
