Customer

The Fortune 500 company is a leading producer of cold finish steel bar products for shafting and machined precision parts. Traded on the New York Stock Exchange, the cold finish expert has facilities all over the nation, and is the largest recycler in America – recycling a ton of steel every two seconds – more than the entire aluminum industry combined.

Challenge

Automate the company’s label printing process by utilizing Oracle to generate basic text documents which can be handled in real time by an automated label printing system. The system must be centralized, require no manual queuing of print jobs, and be able to distribute print jobs throughout the nation, and to any printer on their network.

On top of meeting their own needs, the company’s labels must meet the needs of their many vendors. This means the system must be capable of replicating existing label formats – as well as creating new formats from scratch.

Solution

The solution requires a piece of software that can not only design the labels, but can also handle the Oracle output by filling in fields on the label at run time. The chosen software package was NiceLabel Suite from Niceware because of its ability to integrate seamlessly with Oracle.

The chosen integration method was to generate XML from within Oracle that contained the information needed by the label. This XML would be output to a folder on the server. Using a module of NiceLabel Suite (NiceWatch) we were able to detect the XML as soon as it was on the server, link the corresponding XML to variable fields on the label, and print the label to the specified label printer – all without the use of human interaction. NiceLabel is an Oracle certified solution and utilizes the standard Oracle XML format for label printing to eliminate host side changes.

Results

The benefits of the new system are a fully automated label printing system driven by Oracle and NiceLabel Suite. Print jobs are generated in real time and distributed throughout the nation as needed.

By automating the label printing process we have helped eliminate human error, and maximize employee productivity. The end product was a seamless transition into Oracle driven, automated label printing.