Time is money in manufacturing. By saving time, companies can cut costs, increase profits or both. Barcode label solutions for manufacturing contribute by accelerating processes; they also avoid the wait-times that negatively affect the efficiency of a production facility. By making products and locations instantly identifiable by scanning their barcodes, this information can be fed into an IT system that a company can use to optimize planning and execution. However, the barcode label solution itself must also be efficient.
Barcode label printers need to be available in the right locations, either local to a workstation or networked to a central system, so that the labels can be printed on-demand. The barcode label solutions for manufacturing should not themselves introduce any delay into the production sequence. The labels themselves must be tough enough to resist the wear and tear of a manufacturing environment, so that they can always be quickly and correctly scanned. For this level of robustness, thermal transfer print solutions are often a good solution.
When these conditions are met, barcode label solutions for manufacturing can speed up a variety of activities. For instance, a system can react immediately to the barcode scan of incoming raw material, to dispatch information about where to store it. In a similar way, inventory control by scanning barcodes can automatically trigger re-stocking orders when necessary (stock-outs of raw materials cause delays in manufacturing processes); and better control of work in progress, as it moves from one stage of production to another.
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