Case Studies

Greene, Tweed & Company Slashes Labor Costs and Saves Label Production Time

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Producing Over 50,000 Labels Per Day. When Greene, Tweed & Company (GTC) products are at work, there’s not much to see – and that’s the way their customers like it. Their products are the T-rings that ensure absolute control in aerospace applications, the seals used in semiconductor manufacturing that keep the etching process pure and contaminant-free, the critical hydraulic seals in earth moving equipment, and much more. Their parts are relatively small and are made from sixteen different base elastomers, more than 200 unique elastomeric compounds, and nearly 100 plastic production compounds from four distinct plastics families – all produced in-house.

When GTC products are at work you see nothing but a smoothly functioning piece of equipment or a trouble-free production process.

GTC uses over 30 Intermec EasyCoder® 3400 printers in its five facilities with most sites printing over 10,000 labels per day. They use the printers to print inventory and packaging labels to apply to their products. The inventory labels contain tracking and batch information about their products so the packers can easily identify the correct batches for the each customer.

In addition, some of their customers have very specific packaging and labeling criteria that requires GTC to print a customized compliance labels.

Challenge

Printing labels at their sites had been a labor-intensive, redundant process. First, they couldn’t print labels directly from their original ERP system. Data had to pass from their ERP system to another system that produced the label and then send it to the printer. The process was slow and arduous.

Second, because they couldn’t print directly from the ERP system, the development and modification of labels had to be done at two of their sites by a third-party company and the other sites were manually creating and printing labels through some third party software package. This was not only time consuming, but efforts were being duplicated at the other sites. Their labels also lacked a consistent look or feel, so a product going to a customer from one GTC site would look totally different than a product from another site.

Finally, GTC had staff whose responsibility was to manage label production, adding to the company’s overhead and taking those employees away from other critical tasks.

When GTC decided to implement SAP, they needed a solution that would provide them with the ability to print labels directly from its SAP system for all sites so that all the labels have a consistent look and feel in addition to allowing them to control the development and modification of their labels.

Solution

Intermec Technologies Corporation, working with its premier partner Ciber, Inc., installed LabelShop PRO and ERPLabel™ for SAP to create all label designs for its centralized ERP system. Now GTC’s sites use the same data source and the same label formats to produce their inventory, packaging and compliance labels worldwide.

Results

The implementation of ERPLabel has enabled GTC to manage its label printing from one system, saving them time, money and resources. By using LabelShop PRO, they’ve been able to centralize label design, eliminating the need for outside resources and reducing staff time needed to manage label production. The labels now have a consistent look and feel, regardless of which site produces them and there are less opportunities for errors since the label data comes directly from the SAP R/3 system.

GTC has also eliminated duplication of efforts at their sites. Job responsibilities have changed for several of its employees because label production is no longer part of their duties, allowing them to focus on other company needs.

“I believe the biggest benefit that we have seen here at GTC is the overall simplicity of integrating the label formats with our SAP system, said Christine Felbinger, Program Analyst of GTC. “We design the label with the LabelShop PRO software, and the ERPLabel software creates an ITF file, which we can upload as standard text into SAP. Then we just modify our existing ABAP label print program and create a new text element, which references the standard text, in an existing form and – voila, a bar-coded label. The overall programming effort is relatively minimal.”