Customer

The Wisconsin based foundry specializes in ferrous metals: gray iron, ductile iron, stainless steel, and specialty iron castings. As a leader in its field, the Milwaukee based foundry helped its customers build the backbone of civilization by providing castings for many of the products they are famous for throughout the world. Optimizing every process is crucial to minimize down time, and maximize efficiency.

Challenge

Automate the label printing process by utilizing SAP to generate flat text files that can be handled in real time by an automated printing system. These text files would contain the information that is to be printed onto the label. The system must be centralized, require no manual queing of print jobs, and be able to distribute print jobs throughout the nation, and to any printer on the Foundry's network.

On top of developing a new printing system, the new label fi les used must pass an extensive Quality Assurance (QA) evaluation process that visually compares the old labels to the new – ensuring an exact replication.

Solution

The solution requires a piece of label creation software that can not only design the labels, but can also handle the SAP output by filling in fields on the label at run time. The proposed software solution was to use Seagull Scientific's Enterprise Edition which includes Bartender (label design piece) and Commander (automated printing piece).

The chosen integration method was to generate flat text files from within SAP that contained the information that is to be printed onto the physical label. This fl at text file would be dumped into a folder on a server that was being monitored by Commander. As soon as the file was recognized Commander would populate the according fields within the label file, and send the job to the specified printer.

Results

The benefi ts of the new system are a fully automated label printing system driven by SAP and Seagull Scientific's Enterprise Printing software. Print jobs are generated in real time and distributed throughout the nation as needed.

By automating the label printing process we have eliminated the human error element, and maximized employee productivity. The end product was a seemless transition into an SAP driven, automated label printing.