As easily as a child picks out his stuffed teddy bear amongst a pile of similarly stuffed animals, industrial fabrics manufacturer Monterey Mills uses its Intranet site to select and print the right shipping and carton labels for the "fuzzy" material it manufacturers. More than 1,000 customers use the material on stuffed animals, inside music cases and on paint rollers. Depending on the season, the forty-year-old, privately held company prints anywhere from two dozen to several hundred labels daily.

With such a large and diversified customer base, Monterey Mills faces a variety of labeling requirements. True, many customers accept a default label, but others demand specialty labels with designs that can change at any moment. Presently, Monterey Mills must create and apply, at distribution centers in different states, up to 25 customized carton and shipping labels.

Peter Sotos, senior software engineer at Monterey Mills, wanted to use the company's wide area network (WAN) to distribute the label format and have new or revised ones available immediately, but was initially told it couldn't be done. He didn't accept that advice. Instead, he searched until he found a company able to allow label design at the Janesville, WI headquarters and then make the customized labels accessible over a WAN to distribution centers elsewhere in Wisconsin and Tennessee.

What Sotos found was Teklynx® International’s SENTINEL™ Print Pack, a data capture and distributive printing middleware solution that can be integrated with virtually any WMS system. Supplied by Glennon Corp., a Pewaukee, WI-based reseller specializing in labels, printers and AIDC solutions, it automates the printing of labels created with Teklynx's LABELVIEW™ label design software. The multi-threaded architecture of SENTINEL Print Pack allows it to simultaneously manage several printing tasks and send them to multiple printers without compromising performance.

Sotos can now manage the entire labeling operation from one SENTINEL print server and Microsoft® IIS Web server at Monterey Mills's headquarters—just as he wanted. He easily designs or changes customer labels to meet client requirements and then posts them to the Intranet for immediate availability at all distribution centers. According to Sotos, no specialists, knowledgeable in computer language compiling and writing strings, have to be located and hired every time a client changes a label. 
Also, by centralizing label design, maintenance and administration of distributive printing, Monterey Mills has streamlined the labeling process and reduced the work needed to perform printing tasks. "That (centralization) makes it pretty slick. The browser can drive the application and get the labels to anywhere on our wide area network," he says.

A dream

A straightforward process links the applicable database fields with the needed label data.

"LABELVIEW software makes label creation a dream. We just visually create label files and let the application pick the file that needs to be printed. No coding is necessary. It is very easy to set up labels. They can be designed any way you want and the program includes a rich selection of bar codes. I do the calculation for the carton serial number and then use a UCC/EAN 128 bar code format. I also enter the ship to and ship from information,” says Sotos.

When a new custom label is needed, Sotos simply designs the new label with the LABELVIEW software and adds it to the INI file where it is associated with the respective customer's number. The LABELVIEW files are simply copied to the directories that correspond to a shipping location.

It all ties into customized Visual Basic dll files that handle the writing of information to files that SENTINEL picks up and prints as a flat text file, says Sotos. It is totally independent of Monterey's ERP system and operates on Windows NT®.

At the DC: It starts with scanning

Once the label design is completed, it’s available to workers at Monterey's scattered distribution centers who've picked and scanned products into cartons with a triggerless Symbol Technologies LT-1806 scanner.

"The Intranet application collects the scanned data (such as what the product is and quantity picked) into its database. There it is combined with key-entered ship to and from information, PRO number for postal rates provided by the carrier and the carrier. When all is picked for an order, workers use a PC with browser software to access the company's intranet. They enter a sales order number, see the company's name and authorize SENTINEL to generate the carton's content label with the item number, Monterey Mills's part number, description and weight of the carton and the carton reference number.

The SENTINEL system automatically generates the correct carton and shipping labels as well as quantity needed. No matter where the label printer is located, it will receive the most up-to-date label available for the particular client—be it a paint roller manufacturer or major department store.

Labels are printed on high-speed industrial Zebra140XiII and XiIII thermal-transfer and direct-thermal printers, and HP 4000 series LaserJet printers.

"SENTINEL is always running in the background, waiting for something in the directory," says Sotos.

When the carton arrives at the shipping dock, packing lists and shipping labels are printed. The packing list includes the carton reference number with total items in the carton, items ordered and items shipped, total weight of the shipment, ship to and from addresses, total cartons for the shipment, the packing slip number, purchase order number, date of shipment and order number, plus back-ordered items.

The LABELVIEW shipping labels show how many cartons are in the total shipment such as 1 of 4, the bar code, PO number, customer part number, customer description, Monterey Mills's part number, quantity of items in carton, ship to and from addresses, carrier and PRO number, and carton serial number.

The right move for flexibility

"We're very happy we did it this way as an Intranet. It makes doing things over a WAN a lot more accessible," says Sotos.

It also provides a lot of flexibility. For example, on the consumer side of the business where material is shipped in boxes, the system knows how many labels will be needed to ship the material and automatically prints the needed quantity. On the industrial side, however, where the product is in huge rolls, the user enters the customer number and determines how many labels to print.

"It is highly flexible. You just don't have restrictions on where you can send labels, or how they will look. It allows you to comply with whatever your customer needs. Quickly. If I get a new requirement," says Sotos, "I can get it set up in two minutes on SENTINEL. It's a real piece of cake. And, if a new print location is needed, the WAN-based system is set up in a day or less, versus weeks.”

Ten printers are on the system now, but soon the figure will reach 20 as the software on older ones is replaced with software from Teklynx. 

"SENTINEL provides the ability to develop applications that are scalable," says Sotos, making it easy to gradually upgrade the system and to expand the operation as business grows.

Once the other printers are moved to the SENTINEL Print Pack system, Sotos wants to expand to other applications and initiate some report generation. Customer requirements, though, come first.

Monterey Mills isn't being at all fuzzy about its label application system. It has found that Teklynx's Intranet-based system lets it use a WAN to meet demands of a large and diversified customer base. As a result, Monterey Mills successfully identifies and applies the right label, and the newest label, for all 1,000 customers.

For more information visit http://www.teklynx.com