From SCDigest’s On-Target E-Magazine Inbound, Parcel and Retail GSI-128 Labels are Common Applications; Just How Does the Applicator Know What Retail Label to Print? SCDigest Editorial Staff Label printer-applicators are of course very prevalent in manufacturing operations, but certainly have many distribution center applications as well, notably for printing of shipping labels, and especially for printing and applying GS1-128 labels (formerly the UCC-128) to meet retail compliance requirements. The big difference in distribution center applications as opposed to manufacturing is the dynamic nature of the requirements. In general, manufacturing applications involve batches of product that for a time are uniform in size/shape (e.g., cartons of the same SKU), and perhaps more importantly may have the same static product information and bar code identifiers for every label in the batch. SCDigest Says: As cartons approach the print and apply system, the GS1-14 SKU bar code is scanned. That triggers the print and apply control software to find the next order for that SKU in the wave. Even serialized individual products, such as in the high tech industry, may not have a unique serialized bar code identifier on the master case itself built in assembly operations (though some certainly do). Contrast that with compliance shipping label applications, where the size of every box coming down a conveyor line might be different, and more challengingly, not only will some of the data on the label likely change with every label printed, the format (design) of the label itself will vary from retailer to retailer even under the broad GS1-128 standard. That requirement not only adds to the processing time needed to print and apply a label, it means the printer-applicator needs to be controlled by an integrated software application, often a module of a warehouse control system (WCS), though it might also be […]