Sticking With A Good Listener

The client was Bemis, a $300 million global firm based in Sheboygan Falls, Wis., that sells thermal-molding, injection-molding and extrusion-molding products to large retailers such as The Home Depot and John Deere. Steve Steinpreis, operations manager of Bemis' finishing and assembly departments, orders approximately 800,000 bar coded labels annually from Madison, Wis.-based CPT.

Bemis' warehouse employees affix the 7 3/4 x 5-inch labels to pallets, boxes, skids and other containers for product tracking and picking. When Bemis employees use LXE scanners to scan Code 128 bar codes placed on the top-middle of the labels, they capture information such as products' maximum shelf life, date delivered and purchase-order numbers. "If you produce materials with shelf lives, you need a quick way of knowing how old every product in your warehouse is," Steinpreis says. "If you don't, that's dangerous."

But Bemis' labels were falling off some substrates--especially recycled corrugated boxes--and landing on the floor of its 2 million-square-foot warehouse. Labels also were falling off pallets in the company's delivery truck. "Their tracking system was being compromised," says Kristin Esswein, CPT's president. "Employees were sticking tape on the labels in the warehouse. But when delivery drivers opened their doors and couldn't place labels with the correct boxes, no one was quite sure what to do."

Esswein, however, knew she had to do something--and fast. "I dug into the application and looked for an answer," she says.

A Critical Application Before launching her own firm last year, Esswein worked at former Chicago-based manufacturer Data Documents and Hanover Park, Ill.-based distributorship FGI Print Management. She has sold bar coded labels for 10 years, handling the Bemis account since December 1997. Bar coded labels account for 95 percent of CPT's sales.

As an experienced bar coded labels provider, Esswein speaks highly of bar coding and its importance. Bemis, like most other firms intent on streamlining inventory control and other warehousing functions, relies heavily on bar coding. "The [bar coded picking-and-tracking] label is the link between the products Bemis makes and how well they get those products to customers," Esswein says.

The tracking-and-picking label is yellow with a white background. Each label includes a 6-digit alphanumeric code, identifying its part number. Each label also includes a Code 128 bar code on the top-middle (which can be scanned from a distance of 12 feet), as well as two other Code 128 bar codes containing identical information. One is placed on a 2 3/8 x 3/4-inch die-cut label on the bottom-left, and a slightly larger bar code is printed on the bottom-right. (See sample on left.) Warehouse employees peel off the die-cut label and affix it to reporting documents when products move throughout the warehouse. The bar code on the bottom-right can be scanned with a wand if the main bar code is problematic.

Distributors say Code 128 bar codes are gaining popularity, replacing Interleaved 2 of 5 and Code 39 symbologies in many warehouse and distribution applications. Introduced in 1981, Code 128 is a continuous, bi-directional symbology that can encode the entire ASCII 128-character set as well as four non-data characters. Every character is composed of two digits and begins with a bar and ends with a space.

There's no space for error in Bemis' warehousing operation, Steinpreis says. As the company's warehouse employees remove components from pallets, boxes, skids and other containers, they scan the bar coded labels, reducing the known quantity remaining in those containers. "That way," Steinpreis says, "we ensure that we always know how many items we have, and that we never lose track of items."

Using Bemis' proprietary software, the firm's employees quickly can sort data to determine which warehouse items to pick first. Steinpreis also uses data contained in the bar codes when making production-scheduling and purchasing decisions. "By having this information, I can take a quick look at what's old," Steinpreis says. "If we suspect something is of substandard quality, we can sort products by date produced and isolate those from the rest, making sure we only send customers excellent-quality products. These labels are critical to our operation."