In pretty much every warehouse, factory, freight depot or distribution centre across the world there sits at least one industrial-strength printer, busy churning out barcode labels, invoices, picking lists or delivery notes. Without such workhorses, distribution can often come to a grinding standstill and not only are delivery schedules and costs affected but also business reputations.
Downtime can cost dearly both in terms of lost productivity and in repair/replacement charges of the broken machine. I’ve spoken to a number of large retailers, logistics providers and manufacturers in my time and all will agree that downtime’s a costly business, indeed one supermarket put the figure at £100,000 an hour — no small number! It would be impossible to completely eliminate the risk of downtime but it can be significantly reduced by good maintenance/replacement schedules, technological advances and improved working practices.
The unsung heroes of the print world have to operate in some pretty demanding and hostile environments — think chiller sections for example — and while they may only account for a small percentage of total IT spend, when they go wrong, it’s noticeable and there’s often more far-reaching implications to interrupting flow through the supply chain.
And I’m not just talking here about the logistics of moving goods to and from shops and factories, I’m also talking about the role of barcode labelling in internet shopping. The UK postal and courier industry is worth £4.4billion*, and accurate and timely parcel labelling will play a significant role in the success of home and work e-tail deliveries and in the uptake of ‘last mile’, ‘click and collect’ and ‘parcel collection shop’ initiatives.
I would argue that warehouse print is the most essential part of the whole logistics process, the accurate moving of goods from A to B but it’s an often overlooked element of the IT function. You’d be surprised at how few organisations actually know what printers they have in their back office or what they’re doing! And with staff increasingly choosing to bring your own device (BYOD) to work the issue has only been exacerbated in terms of controlling costs and managing repairs.
‘Printing’ per se tends to fall under the remit of general IT and while many organisations have been judicious enough to implement managed print services (MPS) in their front-offices few have even considered the concept ‘through the warehouse door’. It’s crazy, we’ve proven time and time again how MPS can reduce real costs by over 30% and yet the message still isn’t getting through.
We get that these kind of printers don’t get upgraded as often as their front office counterparts and that’s fine, because we still have the wherewithal to maintain old models from the likes of Fujitsu, Printronix, Genicom, Datasouth and Intermec. But not having a proper plan in place for what happens when your primary workhorse fails to print a word makes no sense whatsoever.
I recall that we once had a fault reported on a machine ‘not feeding labels’. The absence of a platen roller, rewind roller, tear bar pressure toggle, various belts and pulleys and the ribbon bar may have had something to do with it! Come on, show some love to these machines, you’ll miss them when they’re not there.
* Source: Rapid Parcel
