©2015 Loftware, Inc. All Rights Reserved. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. • www.loftware.com1

CAN YOU SCALE AND MANAGE GLOBAL BARCODE LABELING?

LOFTWARE SERIES: PART 6 OF 7

INTERVIEW WITH RICK BODWELL, LEAD SOLUTIONS ENGINEER, LOFTWARE, INC.

BLUEPRINT FOR LABELING SUCCESS: A SEVEN-PART SERIESABZ

ABZ

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How can you optimize mission-critical labeling to enable your business to succeed in today’s evolving global supply chain? This Q&A is part of a seven part series that addresses key questions that companies should consider when they review ensuing requirements and current capabilities of their existing barcode labeling solutions. The series will explore all of the labeling essentials involved in creating a “Blueprint for Labeling Success.” We’ll question a panel of Loftware labeling experts to take a closer look at how companies today utilize Enterprise Labeling Solutions to meet complex labeling challenges while scaling to meet global labeling requirements.

As global companies continue to expand their presence internationally, they must consider how to efficiently deploy and maintain labeling solutions so they can scale seamlessly. The focus, even when deploying solutions in a distributed fashion, is to continue to maintain the ability to leverage common data sources, components and configurations across sites. This is essential to handle the rigors of global infrastructures, allowing users to manage outages and connectivity issues, while providing high availability, failover and disaster recovery capabilities. The advent of multi-tier architectures and browser-based labeling solutions as offered with Enterprise Labeling Solutions provide even more flexibility to enable centralized and decentralized deployment options.

Q. WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES OF MAINTAINING LABELING ACROSS A GLOBAL OPERATION?It can be a monumental task to maintain labeling across a global operation. Companies that are global in nature have different operations and labeling requirements based on their products and the requirements of the countries and regions that they serve. So, part of the challenge of maintaining labeling across a global operation is to understand the unique requirements in each region.

As companies grow they frequently inherit labeling systems that are unique to a particular location and may be either packaged or homegrown applications. Although these systems might meet requirements at the local level, managing

A BLUEPRINT FOR LABELING SUCCESS: A SEVEN PART SERIES

CAN YOU SCALE AND MANAGE GLOBAL BARCODE LABELING?

ABZABZ

Rick Bodwell is Lead Solutions

Engineer at Loftware.

Mr. Bodwell maintains over 15

years experience in software

engineering with a focus on

Enterprise Labeling Solutions. He

has served a vast array of large

companies and specializes in

labeling industry best practices.

Mr. Bodwell has worked with

global organizations to address

a wide range of labeling

requirements including how to

address evolving regulatory and

customer requirements.

INTERVIEW WITH RICK BODWELL, LEAD SOLUTIONS ENGINEER, LOFTWARE, INC.

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labeling across a global supply chain becomes very difficult for a company that wants to have centralized control and manage labeling consistency, while keeping track what’s being done at the regional level. This becomes a big challenge in regard to duplication of effort.

For instance, a company might have a hundred different locations across the world and those sites may have similar products but their products may be created, packaged and labeled differently in each region. Having so many disparate labeling systems means that there is a lack of consistency and so it becomes difficult to implement global changes to a brand, product or label format because the change would need to be replicated across all of those hundred sites. This is especially difficult when companies are looking to maintain consistency while reconciling the unique regulatory, customer and regional requirements at each location.

Also, changes in permutations of labels can cause a significant duplication of effort and significant expense. Each region may spend significant money on localized IT or other valuable resources in maintaining labeling systems and updating labels. Although, this is a duplication of effort, and significant time and money could be saved if labeling was deployed and managed centrally. It is quite common for locations to want to maintain control labeling locally and have autonomy regarding decisions about the content and packaging of their products. However, these regions still gain value from having a centralized resource that they can tap into to help support their deployment while ensuring alignment with global standards.

Q. HOW CAN IMPLEMENTING AN ENTERPRISE LABELING SOLUTION HELP ADDRESS THESE CHALLENGES?The most substantial benefit in implementing an Enterprise Labeling Solution is the cost savings companies can achieve by not duplicating efforts across the globe. Using an Enterprise Labeling Solution allows a centralized approach with the ability to allow for localized autonomy as appropriate. In most cases, the solution can be maintained centrally but still allow users access from around the world to log in and create a structure where they can make changes to labels as permitted and control the configuration of their local label printing devices. This allows everyone to be aligned while meeting the needs for the region where they’re conducting business.

Companies are looking to maximize efficiency and minimize the cost of localized solutions while reducing the duplication of effort. With an Enterprise Labeling approach, companies are able to access the same centralized data to reduce the necessary number of label permutations and ultimately cut back on duplication of efforts throughout the global supply chain. What this does is allow for the idea of label and package consolidation to meet global standards and it also brings in to play the idea of master templates. These templates are mostly locked down but can be modified slightly to meet regional requirements while not forcing resources to create their own labels from scratch. In some cases companies have many thousands of templates, just staggering numbers of templates, because essentially the label is for the same product but the templates are being duplicated many, many times.

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This approach also eliminates error prone manual labeling processes to substantially reduce the occurrence of mislabeling, which is not only costly but can delay response times and have a huge impact on customer satisfaction. Mislabeling also has a big impact on the corporate brand and can jeopardize customer trust and ultimately the customer relationship.

Q. WHAT TYPE OF DEPLOYMENT MODELS ARE USED FOR LARGE SCALE, GLOBAL COMPANIES? The deployment model that is most often used by large, global organizations is to have a highly available centralized environment containing the master templates and controlling access to those templates. This also allows for different environments like test, development, QA, and production environments so that way all companies sites are staying in synch with master data.

There are several benefits to adopting this model. Different centralized environments can have a sandbox environment where label templates can be continually evaluated for new products and new content, and they can be promoted to the next environment, QA or Production, keeping it in line with master data. You never want to have a new product label that makes its way into production without the formal review and approval cycles. If you had a label that was not ready to go live and it somehow finds its way onto the product floor, the business is at risk for fines and customer issues.

When your labeling is standardized, even if it’s distributed versus centralized, it’s the same technology platform so the IT staff can support the product in a predictable fashion. Also, when there’s access to central environment there’s still opportunity to have a distributed copy of the solution for backup purposes. If for some reason you get cut off from corporate headquarters because of interruptions to the network, you still have a solution and print labels on demand, just in time, at the regional level. Having a standard solution that is supported both internally and by the software vendor is important and having a centralized, scalable approach to labeling is critical in managing large scale, global deployments.

Q. HOW DOES A COMPREHENSIVE ENTERPRISE LABELING SOLUTION SIMPLIFY MAINTENANCE AND LIMIT IT INVOLVEMENT? Given the mission critical importance of labeling to a company’s supply chain, most infrastructures for enterprise labeling are redundant, backed up and highly available, and the resources and staff are trained and very knowledgeable about keeping the environment online, running, and in synch with the latest updates and patches. That way the down time is minimized and there’s less risk of someone taking down the entire solution or system which could happen more commonly in an approach where there’s local decision making.

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About Loftware - Loftware, Inc. is the global market leader in Enterprise Labeling Solutions with more than 5,000 customers in over 100 countries. Offering the industry’s

most comprehensive labeling solution, Loftware’s enterprise software integrates SAP®, Oracle® and other enteprise applcations to produce mission-critical barcode labels,

documents, and RFID Smart tags across the supply chain. Loftware’s design, native print, and built-in business rules functionality drives topline revenue, increases customer

satisfaction, and maximizes supply chain efficiency for customers. With over 25 years of industry leadership, Loftware’s Enterprise Labeling Solutions and best practices enable

leading companies to meet their customer specific and regulatory requirements with unprecedented speed and agility. Loftware, with thousands of customers worldwide, is the

foremost authority and global market software leader in delivering innovative business solutions for enterprise labeling requirements. Visit www.loftware.com.

When you’re limiting IT involvement, what you want to do is have a tiered structure like with the Enterprise Labeling model. With this approach, there are internal resources that have been trained in knowledge transfer and best practices so they know the protocol to support the mission critical label printing. At the same time, companies have an IT staff that knows how to troubleshoot and support the labeling solution because the company has standardized on a single solution. The ability to enable business users to perform tasks ranging from label design to printer configuration also means that companies can simplify maintenance and limit IT involvement, especially in day-to-day operation. This can save the business a great deal of time and money.

Q. WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF MODERN, MULTI-TIER ARCHITECTURES AND BROWSER-BASED LABELING SOLUTIONS? There are three main advantages of leveraging modern, multi-tier labeling solutions including scalability, flexibility and consistency. From a scalability perspective a multi-tier architecture enables companies to add more processing power as needed by adding more hardware and application servers to meet specific processing requirements. Flexibility is also inherit in this type of solution, enabling you to extend secure, browser-based access to anyone in your organization or supply chain that needs to take part in the labeling process. Lastly, from a consistency perspective, modern enterprise applications like ERP systems share a similar architecture which makes deploying an Enterprise Labeling Solution in a company’s existing infrastructure simpler and makes integration with transaction systems responsible for driving label data easier as well.

Q. WHY IS IT SO IMPORTANT FOR AN ENTERPRISE LABELING SOLUTION TO FACTOR IN HIGH AVAILABILITY, FAILOVER AND DISASTER RECOVERY CAPABILITIES? Maintaining production uptime and ensuring business continuity is essential. If label printing goes down that means locations aren’t able to manufacture, move, inventory, or ship products. For global organizations, an interruption to business operation and their supply chain is unacceptable and extremely costly. That’s why it’s very important to have an Enterprise Solution that takes into account the capability to have high availability, to be able to replicate failover and be seamlessly redundant through the most modern technology, to have the ability to maintain itself and make labeling highly available so it won’t go down and mission critical operations are not impacted. The cost of ten minutes of downtime by some companies can be measured in the millions and ensuring uninterrupted label production is vital to enabling continuous operations.