One plant prints 150,000 labels a week on 200 printers. NiceLabel LMS saves an average 7 seconds per label to get the data and print over their legacy systems

Thic company is a large European engineering group that designs and manufactures equipment for many sectors of the economy. They selected NiceLabel LMS to power their labeling-as-a-service solution to deliver critical real-time labels to their automated manufacturing and logistics operations.

Their Manufacturing Operations Service Delivery department is responsible for IT for all the infratructure that enable the group to manufacture products in its factories. Their goal is to apply best practices and provide IT systems and services that make sure things run as they should.

Labelling problems

Fragmentation

One area the group wanted to standardise was on-demand label printing. The pilot business had several factories each with one or more different labelling systems. Applying best practices was out of the question as each factory had its own tailored solutions.

Languages

The business needed to produce labels in multiple languages but their the labelling systems could not handle Chinese characters consistently. Factories were hard-coding the same label format several times to fit the requirements of their labelling systems and printers.

Label quality control

The factories did not label change history with the systems they had in place. When there was an error, the investigation was time-consuming and it was virtually impossible to pinpoint how it occurred.

Solution

The company decided it needed a centralised platform for labelling to roll out to all factories. They selected NiceLabel LMS to integrate with their PLM, ERP and MES systems.

The LMS runs on a private cloud. A single server hosts the NiceLabel Document Management System and a number of servers host the NiceLabel integration system. Some plants with internet connectivity, such as in China, have production servers which occasionally synchronise with the central system.

Label Designer for business users

The company does the initial design for all labels connected to the bill of materials, such as product identification labels, with their CAD software. They store them in their PLM system and create an XML file for the NiceLabel label designer. This means 70% of label design work has already been done.

Business users design all other labels from scratch without IT assistance in NiceLabel label designer. NiceLabel LMS makes these label templates available to the factories in the business group.

Seamless integration with universal label templates

NiceLabel’s integration system connects to SAP and the various MES at factory level. NiceLabel provides for universal label templates that can be printed from any of these business systems. This means the factories enjoy label consistency and compliance with fewer templates and less change requests.

Results

Increased productivity

The old systems could take eight seconds to print a label. That time has come down to an average of 300 milliseconds.

Maximum speed of implementation

Using the NiceLabel Automation module to apply business rules and logic the Service Delivery group has minimised deployment time and cost.

Payback in less than four months

When planning the project the Service Delivery group estimated software standardisation and IT savings would return the investment less than four months. The NiceLabel implementation met their expectations.

Extension to other business areas

Continuing savings and added flexibility in hardware procurement.prompted the group to offer NiceLabel as a best practice service to other business areas in the organisation..In 5 years the group went from a pilot site with 20 printers to 22 sites with 1,200 printers and a continuing rollout. The largest site prints 150,000 labels a week on 200 printers.

Warehouse success story

One of the warehouses wanted to use a wireless printing device. This would have meant duplicating their printing system, a significant investment. NiceLabel enabled the warehouse to use the same system for desktop and mobile printing at no extra cost.

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