International group gets NiceLabel Enterprise to control its factories

The UK arm of an international group manufacturing plastic building products decided to bring labelling under central control. This company is a long standing Codeway customer.

The group has grown by acquisition. Today it manufactures thousands of products in many locations.

The need for central control

Labelling has become a major day to day problem. Each factory does its own thing.

With so many operators at so many sites there is always significant risk of products getting the wrong labels, out of date formats, or the wrong data on the right label.

It is upgrading its ERP software to give it the flexibility to balance demand in its markets to production capacity.

Switching production means switching labelling capability. Products must always have the same labels where ever they are made.

A further requirement is sequential numbering and control of the sequence counters.

A flexilble solution

The group has many makes and model of label printer and print engines: Avery Dennison, Zebra, Sato, Datamax and others. And several types of labelling software.

NiceWatch Enterprise is a solution for label printing and NiceLabel Enterprise Print Manager the solution for controlling the printers.

The pilot programme is for ten printers at two UK sites. Roll out will be to other UK and European sites.

Implementation

The company’s project team came to Codeway for a training workshop on system implementation.

The team has decided to centralise all its label formats and label data on an SQL Server database.

They will redesign about 100 label formats using NiceLabel Pro for the pilot.

The standard method of printing through NiceWatch will be file triggers. Weighscales will use COM triggers.

Shop floor data capture

The team will pilot three methods of capturing product and quantity data from the factory floor for label printing: in-house development, NiceForm, and web based.

In-house development was the original favourite, but the Visual Basic scripting in NiceForm makes it an attractive option.

However web printing via a browser now appears to be the simplest and most flexible option for a group wide tool.

When NiceLabel Enterprise is fully implemented there will be uniformity of labels and multi-lingual data across the group.

Contact

Please email or call Kathy Jolly and Barry Day +44 (0) 1206 751300