What business doesn’t want to be more efficient?
Efficiency, after all, is one of the keys to business growth. No matter what industry you’re in, success means using all your resources — including your finances, raw materials, time, and people — to their maximum potential.
Label printing is one area where seemingly minor changes can result in tremendous efficiency gains for your business.
The right label company will work with you as a partner to identify these opportunities, whether in your label’s construction and design, your label application process, or your approach to ordering.
There are three primary ways a label company can help your business become more efficient:
- By speeding up your operation.
- By saving you money.
- By reducing your waste.
Let’s take a closer look at each area:
How the Right Label Company Makes Your Team Faster
Many label-related inefficiencies emerge from assumptions and misunderstandings. For example, you might assume that the format (rolls, sheets, single) and size your label printer supplies is the only option available. And that’s completely understandable: If your label company never told you otherwise, how would you know that different formats, as well as larger or smaller sizes, exist?
But a good label printer knows that labels should not come in a one-size-fits-all format. Labels should be packaged to help you maximize your productivity.
Here’s how that works in practice: Anybody who works in any kind of operations capacity knows you never shut down equipment if you can help it. If you plan to print onto your labels in-house or apply them with machines, you will likely see a significant speed improvement with larger rolls. The larger the rolls, the less often you’ll have to halt your machinery to switch rolls. On the other hand, if your labels will be hand-applied, things might go much faster with smaller rolls, particularly if you have multiple operators in the application process. You might even consider if sheets or single cut labels will be most efficient.
The right label printer will not allow you to make assumptions that can potentially slow your team down. Instead, they’ll take an intense interest in your equipment and your plans for your label. Your label printer will help you choose the proper roll size and label format to get the job done as speedily as possible.
How the Right Label Company Helps You Optimize Expenses
Lean manufacturing is a popular business trend for a reason. Lean companies focus only on those activities that create value — in other words, what they can sell given the immediate demand — to wring maximum efficiency out of their resources.
Lean manufacturing often involves only ordering and keeping on hand the materials you need at the moment. But while this strategy may be effective in certain situations, ordering only as many labels as you need at a time can be less cost-effective.
Most label printers, like most vendors, will offer you discounts for buying in larger quantities. Plus, every new shipment of labels incurs shipping costs. If you know how many labels you expect to need over a certain period, it may be more cost-effective to order, say, a million labels at once, rather than 200,000 labels five times.
On the other hand, there are storage costs and other factors to consider. For example, if your engineering group is prone to making frequent revisions, you may find your business in possession of hundreds of thousands of useless labels.
Balancing your company’s current and future needs with your budget can be a tricky calculation. The right label company will not only help you do the math but will suggest creative options that mitigate risk while saving money. (For example, they might allow you to put in a blanket order and then release labels to you bit by bit, as you request them.)
Other ways the right label printer can help you save money include:
- Suggesting alternative label materials that cost less and perform just as well (if not better).
- Helping you decide which label features give you the most bang for your buck and which only add cost without adding value.
- Recommending less expensive color and ink options (like going with a half-tone black instead of a Pantone gray).
How the Right Label Company Helps You Reduce Waste
People don’t always think about waste management when they think about efficiency, but reducing waste isn’t just about being environmentally friendly — although that in itself is a worthy goal. Excessive waste is an indicator that materials are not being used as efficiently as they could be.
Labels typically come attached to protective liners. When the labels are applied, the liners must be discarded. Unfortunately, silicone-coated label liners cannot be recycled in the standard paper recycling stream.
Your label printer might be able to save you the hassle and expense of searching for a recycling outlet on your own. Some label suppliers collect used liners — at no additional cost — and ship them to specialized recyclers.
Your label company may also help you determine whether liner-less labels are appropriate for your application. Another option they may suggest is using a thinner liner. Thinner liners allow for more labels per roll, which, as we described above, means stopping your equipment less often to swap out rolls. (It also means lighter shipping weights and lower storage demands.)
Choose the Efficiency Experts
At The Label Printers, we have helped countless customers over the decades streamline their label planning, buying, and application processes. Some recent examples include:
- Giving a new customer additional unit price breaks for ordering larger quantities.
- Creating a customized Kanban system for a lean customer. The customer puts in their order each afternoon, and by 7 a.m. the next morning, their labels are ready.
- Taking over distribution for a customer with multiple plants around the country, setting up a system that allows individual plants to order the labels they need from a centralized block of inventory.
Can The Label Printers help your business save time, reduce costs, and conserve resources? Contact us today to talk about it.
