Global medical device company that designs, develops, and manufactures in-house streamlines its international labeling. Before Loftware, the company created label designs using Adobe Illustrator or Label Matrix. Each label had its own template, which could not be reused. This created a significant burden on the internal approval team. Even when the same symbols or images were used on multiple templates, the team needed to approve each instance or template individually. The inability to reuse label templates meant they needed to maintain hundreds of label templates. Now, Loftware’s solution handles all the product labels, including pouch, bag, box, and kit labels. The Loftware team worked with the company to templatize its labels and consolidate them into single templates.
Prior to the integration, the company’s team manually entered variable data into the system for each print run. This significantly increased the likelihood of data entry errors. By integrating labeling with SAP, they automated the entire label printing process. All product data is now stored in SAP. To start the label printing process, an employee scans the shop order – a document containing a product’s batch data. Loftware uses the order number to execute a REST API (Representational State Transfer) call to SAP. SAP looks up the shop order, finds the required labels, gathers the necessary information, puts this in a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), and sends it back to the Loftware application. It then analyzes the JSON and gives the employee the list of labels included in the shop order. The employee then selects the labels they want to print. Loftware’s solution will then pull all the data from the JSON, combine it with the appropriate template, put it into a label, and send it to print.
Integrating with SAP also helped the company achieve another goal, which was to create a more streamlined label printing process across all printers. Some of the printers they use had different methods of handling data entry, which increased the risk of errors and the need for end-user training. Now that label creation and printing are integrated with SAP, employees can use the same interface and process regardless of the printer. This process enables the company to print from multiple locations across the globe using CSAT, Trojan, Avery, Datamax, and Indigo printers. The team was also able to use Loftware to automate printer-specific requirements. For example, for each print job, CSAT printers require a job ticket file in addition to the PDF of the label. The team created a custom business rule within the Loftware solution to automatically generate the job ticket along with the PDF file and send it to the CSAT printer.
As a company in a highly regulated industry, they must retain a copy of each printed label for audit purposes. Previously, the team would manually make a copy of each label and then put it on file. Now the process is automated, so each time an employee executes a print in the Loftware solution, the system prints two labels – one for the product and one for the audit file.
