materialhandlingupdate PRINTING AND LABELING
Also consider what type of surface the label has to adhere
to, says Michael Shacket of Corner Office Consulting,
which provides middleware as well as labeling and print-ing-related consulting services to distributors and manufacturers. If the surface is greasy, for example, a Mylar or
polyester label might be the best choice, he says.
No matter what type of label material you choose, it pays
to use high-quality media, says Johnson. Low-quality or
inconsistent material can degrade an image’s resolution
and may hasten fading.
2. Keep your printer in good working order
Print quality also has a big impact on readability. An important part of keeping that quality up is regular printer maintenance. Printheads, in particular, can deteriorate with use and
need to be regularly monitored and maintained. “Over time,
some of the heat positions within the printer don’t fire or get
hot enough, and the bar code ends up missing bars or there are
spots that are too light to be read,” says Shacket.
Temperature can also affect how the bar code prints, especially if the printer is exposed to the outdoors, such as at a dock
door. “If [the printer is] set up in the winter, the bar codes will
print out nice, but then in the summer, you may see overprinting,” Shacket warns. The printer’s heat sensitivity may
need to be adjusted to accommodate temperature changes.
Experts agree that it’s easier to maintain a printer if the
company has chosen a model that matches its needs in the
first place. But companies don’t always do that, Shacket says.
He’s seen operations using low-end models designed for
office use to print a high volume of labels, as well as operations with expensive heavy-duty printers that sit idle much of
the time. “If you’re printing 100 labels a day, you probably
don’t need a $5,000 printer,” he says. These missteps can be
avoided by gathering detailed data on your labeling operations before you go to choose a printer, he says.
3. Don’t overlook label design
It’s also important to give some thought to what information will be included on the label and how it will be presented. Obviously, you have to make sure you’re meeting
customers’ requirements in that regard. If you don’t have a
full-time labeling specialist on staff, assign someone to keep
in regular contact with customers to make sure their needs
are being met and to stay abreast of any changes.
Templates and label management software can simplify
the task of keeping up with changing customer requirements. While it may be tempting to skip this step, creating
templates will help you avoid extra work in the long run,
says Shacket. For instance, if it becomes necessary to make
a change to the labels, you only have to change one template instead of potentially thousands of labels. Similarly,
compliance label management software can take a lot of the
pain out of tracking multiple customers’ requirements.
As for readability, there are several simple things you can
do to boost the legibility of your labels. Using colored fonts
or highlighting can help draw workers’ attention to important information, like the ship date. In the case of bar codes,
boosting readability may be as simple as leaving enough
white space around the code (the so-called “quiet zone”) to
ensure that the scanning gun can read it.
When it comes to legibility, large labels with large type are
better than small ones. Not only are they easier for humans
to read, but they’re also friendlier to scanners—it’s easier to
hit a half-inch bar code with a scanning gun than it is to hit
a quarter-inch code, says Shacket. For these reasons, Shacket
recommends using the biggest label that your product or
packaging can reasonably accommodate. The cost difference
between a 4- by 4-inch label and a 4- by 6-inch label is negligible, but it can make a big difference in readability, he says.
Finally, keep in mind that the label is only as good as the
data that goes on it. Cozzone of Colorcon warns that data
quality and accuracy may suffer if there are too many systems—like multiple enterprise resource planning systems
or warehouse management systems—feeding information
to the label program.
“A label looks so simple,” says Cozzone. “But once you
start looking at what content you need, where that content
comes from, and how it gets there, it becomes clear that
some work and effort are involved in the creation of the
label on the back end.”
