Quite a few companies have selected SAP as their enterprise resource planning system. Their choice helps them to digitally transform many of their company’s internal processes, and with this, comes productivity and efficiency gains. But they still struggle with labeling. If your company uses SAP, you might be familiar with one - or all - of the following approaches to labeling:
To create a truly agile labeling process, you need a labeling system that’s built for that purpose, i.e. for designing, printing and maintaining labels, as well as one that integrates seamlessly with your SAP environment. You need an Enterprise Labeling Solution.
By selecting an Enterprise Labeling Solution – like Loftware Spectrum, which is built specifically for barcode labeling, you can greatly simplify your label creation and maintenance process, while significantly reducing your IT burden. Spectrum includes a built-in label designer that enables users to create labels in minutes, without coding. With universal label templates and data-driven dynamic content, you can quickly design complex labels that can be used across any printer brand or model. This helps drastically reduce the number of templates you need to create and maintain. A process that took weeks or even months can now be done in minutes. And the easy-to-use interface allows you to delegate label creation and update responsibilities to other parts of the organization, freeing up valuable IT resources to work on other value-adding projects.
As you can see, when you transition to an Enterprise Labeling Solution, you get so much more than an upgraded label design experience. You gain the opportunity to transform and improve every phase of your label production process. We’ve explored quality control and print speed, now let’s take a look at the logic governing your label production process.
Every labeling environment typically has an element of business rules applied to the labeling process. This can range from the simple, such as selecting which label needs to be printed for a particular customer or material, to the complex, such as determining which languages need to be on a label shipped to a particular region or customer. Implementing an Enterprise Labeling Solution gives you the option to build this logic into your labeling process, so these decisions are made automatically by the system. For example, Loftware Spectrum includes workflows and a configurable business rules engine that allow you to drive label template selection, content, formatting – even the printers used – based on the data set supplied by SAP. These rules make printing labels an automated process. Using this capability to automate decision-making workflows reduces the likelihood of human error and speeds the label production process. This also enables companies to customize their label workflow to satisfy specific customer or industry requirements.
One of the major goals of implementing an Enterprise Labeling Solution is to be able to increase the speed with which you can design and print labels. However, using a system built for barcode labeling offers other benefits as well. For example, integrating Spectrum with SAP leverages master data without requiring time-consuming data duplication or error-prone manual entry. Actions you take in SAP can trigger printing of your labels, which include the latest information from your SAP data. This streamlines label printing processes while yielding highly accurate labels. By leveraging your data with certified integration, you can virtually eliminate label errors and the need to reprint labels.
The benefits of integration aren’t limited to SAP and ERP systems. With the integration capabilities built into Loftware Spectrum, you can also integrate other business systems, such as manufacturing execution systems (MES), warehouse management systems (WMS) or in-house applications. This enables you to print from a single repository of templates and print labels based on transactions from different systems, with the knowledge that all print transactions are stored in one central location. And printing from multiple integrated systems happens automatically, requiring no intervention on your part. This gives you the flexibility to drive your labeling with the systems you use to run your business.
An Enterprise Labeling Solution can solve another common pain – label printing speed. There are typically two approaches to printing labels in an SAP environment. One is sending master data via the spooler to legacy label software for printing. However, this method offers no print preview, which means there’s no way to perform a quality check of the label with the master data integrated prior to printing. This can lead to errors and time-consuming reprints. As an alternative to this approach, some companies decide to program SAP system integrations in-house. However, the level of programming needed to seamlessly integrate an external labeling system with SAP to produce a label preview may take several months and can be a costly affair. And, if something changes in their SAP system, they have to change their custom integration program.
Is there another way? Put simply, yes. By choosing an Enterprise Labeling Solution like Loftware Spectrum, with built-in SAP-certified integration, you get label template previews with master data and true on-demand instant printing of labels, all directly within the SAP system user interface – without spending months writing code. How is this possible? Loftware’s bi-directional communication with an integrated SAP system allows you to see what prints in your Spectrum – directly from your SAP interface. Your labels print faster and the process is more efficient. Plus, you get real-time print status feedback and confirmed print delivery, resulting in a streamlined SAP label printing process and less risk.
At Loftware, we understand that you require flexibility when deploying your labeling systems. Deployment of your labeling solution is often determined by your SAP installation. That’s why we offer several options. Moving to the S4/HANA in the cloud? Select SaaS based Spectrum Cloud and let us manage your labeling application for you. That way, you can leverage Loftware’s global cloud platform, advanced security, high available and 24x7 support to manage, maintain and monitor your labeling system. If you prefer to run your SAP system on premises, we offer several options to deploy your Spectrum – all of which integrate with your on-premise SAP systems. And, if you are running your SAP systems and labeling on-premise today, with a plan to move to the cloud in the future, we accommodate that as well. This ensures your investment in Loftware Spectrum will meet your business needs well into future.
By integrating with SAP, we were able to reduce manual data entry and verification steps.
Dan Torrey, DiaSorin
Just think; this started with a desire to design and print labels faster. Yet, by seizing the opportunity to transform labeling by implementing a modern Enterprise Labeling Solution, you gain so much more. You digitize quality assurance, increase print speed and accuracy and get a faster time-to-market. And the benefits don’t have to end there. Now that everything is streamlined and standardized, you can extend your label production process across multiple production lines, plants, locations and even to business partners. You can scale it up or down depending on market demand and extend it throughout the supply chain. Using the cloud technology built into Loftware Spectrum, you can connect all your printers across borders and regions, quickly establishing consistent labeling processes across your entire organization. This leads to efficiency gains that go beyond increased productivity.
It’s no wonder that many of our customers have chosen a Loftware Spectrum as their global labeling platform, incorporating it into their IT business strategy and deploying it alongside SAP in their factories, production facilities and distribution centers.
Find out more about how our SAP customers have benefited by transforming their labeling.
