If your business produces products that pass through supply chains for retail, healthcare, defense or other industries, you’ll know how important accurate labeling and coding on your products and packaging is for compliance and supporting your customers.
Each level of packaging, primary, secondary and tertiary, has its requirements for coding and labeling, some of which can be pretty complicated. These need to be 100% correct every time to ensure compliance with industry and regulatory standards and provide accurate information for your customers.
Traditionally, coding and labeling systems have been treated as stand-alone devices—each item on a packaging line is set up individually for every new production run.
This is time-consuming and can be very prone to error as print data and label formats are sent to the various printers on the line.
How Integrated Coding and Labeling Can Help
Integrated Coding and Labeling systems move away from the individual device model and treat all the printers on a packaging line as a single connected entity.
This allows the print data for every point on the line to be sent in a single operation – usually without human intervention.
This makes things much easier for the operators, saving time on product changeovers and ensuring that the correct data is sent to each printer.
In addition, as new barcode formats such as GS1’s Digital Link become more widely adopted (as part of the Sunrise 2027 program), the need to add more data to barcodes will mean connectivity to your data sources will become increasingly critical.
Functions of an Integrated Coding & Labeling System
- The system manages the print formats for all the printing devices on the packaging line(s).
Having a single, properly managed location for all the print formats ensures that the current, approved version is used every time and that compliance rules are met.
This can be on a local network drive or in the cloud. - Communicates with product information systems, such as ERP or warehouse software, both locally and in the cloud.
- All the print data and setup parameters for a particular product run can be retrieved from storage and loaded to printers with minimal human intervention.
- The system uses Windows printer drivers to send formats and data when they are available.
This would include thermal printers, some inkjet printers and some laser coders.
Where printer drivers are unavailable, the data can be sent to the print device in a correctly formatted text or XML file. This is also true when sending setup parameters to vision systems and barcode readers. This combination of native drivers and serial or network communications allows these systems to control and print to most types of coding and labeling printing equipment.
Examples of Integrated Coding & Labeling Solutions
CoLoS® from Markem-Imaje and CLARiSUITE™ from Videojet were two of the original integrated coding and labeling systems.
Both systems were developed to network and control the manufacturers’ products, which locked customers into standardizing their use of them.
Over time, CoLoS and CLARiSUITE have evolved to support various print devices from other brands, such as drivers for Zebra thermal printers, and have expanded functionality for print quality control and diagnostics.
Loftware Solutions
Loftware is firmly established as a provider of labeling solutions for large enterprises, but the company’s acquisition of NiceLabel gave it access to excellent integrated labeling for smaller businesses.
Like most label software companies, NiceLabel produced print drivers for most thermal printers used in packaging. The company also developed drivers for many other types of printers, such as thermal inkjet, piezo inkjet and lasers.
Combining these with NiceLabel’s PowerForms app allowed integrators and customers to produce applications that managed printing for all the devices on a packaging line—sending data by text or XML files when no driver was available.
Now that NiceLabel products have been integrated into Loftware, there are integrated solutions for companies of just about any size that can manage label and print design, control data flow from both cloud and local databases, and print to most coding devices and labeling systems.
Final Thoughts
Since the codes on your primary packaging and barcodes on secondary packaging and pallets are crucial to compliance and for enabling supply chains, they must be printed with the correct data every time.
By acting as a supervisor between your data storage and your printing devices, an integrated system keeps everything in sync, taking a lot of responsibility from your operators.
Regardless of if you use a manufacturer’s solution, such as those from Markem-Imaje and Videojet, or prefer a more system, like Loftware, an integrated coding and labeling solution brings a lot of advantages to your labeling operations.
