Executives Are Recognizing the Impact of Labeling

As businesses extend their reach across the global supply chain, labeling has become more prominent, involving multiple departments and requiring a new level of attention. Also, it’s clear that labeling has become more complex with evolving customer and regulatory requirements. All this along with increasing recognition from prominent analysts like Gartner and IDC has resulted in top executives becoming more aware of labeling initiatives and the impact they have on businesses. For instance, this year IDC released its first MarketScape study on Enterprise Labeling, which assesses the capabilities and business strategies of vendors in the space. The report suggests that companies recognize Enterprise Labeling as an extension of their supply chain application architecture because it enables improved supply chain operations. Additionally, labeling can have a positive impact on a company’s bottom line by reducing maintenance costs, avoiding fines due to non-compliance and preventing supply chain disruption. These are just a couple reasons why many visionary executives are taking more interest in their company’s labeling strategy. This is supported in the survey with 89% reporting that management views labeling as strategically important.

Labeling Impacts the Bottom Line

Labeling has always been mission critical, but too often it’s overlooked as part of the company’s supply chain strategy. However, labeling plays a critical role having a significant impact on operational efficiency, regulatory compliance and customer satisfaction. This is why top executives are beginning to understand the undeniable impact that labeling has on a company’s bottom line. Enterprise Labeling yields operational efficiencies that translate into significant cost savings generated from reduced capital expenditures, lower IT costs and eliminating penalties and fines. Additionally, by extending labeling to partners and suppliers companies can maximize supply chain efficiencies and eliminate costly relabeling.

Increased Stakeholders Require Greater Visibility

With the number of stakeholders involved in labeling increasing, it’s important to provide added visibility to labeling so that evolving requirements can be addressed and managed more effectively. This is why companies today are standardizing on enterprise-class labeling technologies to simplify and automate processes while improving collaboration among their many teams. As involvement across the organization increases, this demands more attention from executives, creating an expectation for greater insight to labeling activities which can be secured through a higher level of analytics and reporting. An Enterprise Labeling Solution which enables multiple departments and stakeholders to have secure access while providing business intelligence capabilities helps to meet that need. Real time data on the status and health of labeling activities across a global enterprise allows executives to leverage analytics to be better informed and drive improvements and cost reductions.

Scale Labeling with Ease

Visionary executives understand that as they continue to expand their presence internationally, it’s important to have the flexibility to scale everything – including labeling - to meet new business requirements. Whether adding more locations, expanding into new regions, increasing print volumes, or manufacturing new products, companies must be able to extend labeling processes and enable all user to access accurate and consistent labeling data to adhere to corporate standards. The focus, even when deploying solutions in a distributed fashion, is to continue to maintain the ability to leverage common data sources, content and configurations across sites. This type of distributed approach is essential to handle the rigors of global infrastructures, allowing companies to avoid outages and connectivity issues, while providing high availability, failover and disaster recovery capabilities. Standardizing on an Enterprise Labeling Solution enables companies to eliminate siloed efforts across the globe. By centralizing control over global labeling, companies can empower global locations, as well as external suppliers, vendors and partners to access and use standard and approved labels and data and easily scale labeling as the organization grows.

Considering labels allow businesses to identify, group, ship, locate and track goods and merchandise that flow upstream and downstream in their supply chains, it’s clear that labeling impacts both top and bottom lines. By understanding the important role that labeling plays, companies can create new efficiencies and cost savings to keep pace with a new multi-faceted, dynamic supply chain landscape. This is why leaders who embrace innovation and labeling as a key supply chain function will gain a competitive advantage in their markets.

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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 enterprise applications 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 30 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.

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