Mobile Labeling in the Warehouse or Manufacturing Facility
Industry Need
Bar coding is a critical component in maintaining accuracy and efficiency in a warehouse environment. Shipping, receiving, and cross docking, picking and packing, shelf labeling, and tote labeling applications are integral to successful operations. Increasingly, companies are leveraging mobile labeling solutions in these applications. By enabling workers to print labels at the point of activity, mobile solutions enable a more flexible workflow, increased productivity, and fewer errors. Intermec’s integrated mobile printer and Duratherm media products deliver a comprehensive array of choices to meet these needs.
Shipping, Receiving, & Cross Docking
Mobile printing solutions enable workers to quickly generate barcode labels and apply them directly to items as they are unpacked or staged for shipment. Workers wearing belt-mounted mobile printers can re-label pallets and individual cases on the spot, reducing transit time between pallets and a central label printing location to optimize efficiency.
Picking & Packing
The picker’s belt-mounted printer, responding to print commands from the wireless network, generates a pick ticket to guide order fulfillment. After collecting all items needed to close an order, this receipt material serves double duty as the customer’s packing slip. Once the order is scanned complete, a new pick ticket is automatically printed for the worker’s next task.
Mobile Admission Ticket Printing
Industry Need
Fixed ticketing locations suffer from significant limitations when servicing peak attendance volumes. Limited processing points cause bottlenecks that severely restrict flow, causing delays and dissatisfied customers. This can create safety issues with excessive crowds congregating and limit event purchasing to a captive audience within a venue location. Adding stations requires significant investment without adequately addressing dynamically changing service environments.
Advances in mobile ticket printing have enabled users to overcome these limitations by moving ticketing to the point of activity. Taking transactions to the customer places processing points where they are needed most, increasing throughput and reducing wait times. However, this application is not without its challenges. Key requirements must be met for mobile ticketing success; these needs include media with appropriate durability, look and feel, speedy printing, and rugged, reliable equipment.
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Medical Wristbands
Industry Need
Effective patient care is predicated on accuracy, but human error is exceptionally difficult to eliminate in the inherently high-touch medical environment. To address this, barcodes and automatic ID technologies are being used increasingly across a wide range of medical practices. Patient wristbands are one common application area. Intermec patient wristbands ensure positive identification for integration with verification systems for medication, samples, and surgical procedures.
The five rights of medication safety (right patient, right drug, right time, right dose, right route) provide an important framework for verification of pharmaceutical administration, but commonly rely on manual human checks. Integration of positive patient ID with barcode wristbands provides a highly reliable adjunct to eliminate human error. With increasing implementation of patient electronic medical record (EMR), scanning the wristband can trigger caregiver notification of allergies or other special requirements.
The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) has made improving the accuracy of patient identification a high priority, and it remains the number one goal in the pre-release version of the 2010 National Patient Safety Goals (NPSGs) for hospitals. Recognizing the accuracy enhancements of auto ID technologies, bar code verification is specifically cited as an acceptable alternative to resourceintensive two-person verification required for administration of blood products.
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Integration of RFID Smart Labels for Third Party Logistics
Industry Need
Effective warehouse management involves the control and monitoring of movement of materials including receiving, storage, picking, staging, and shipping. The increased use of outsourcing these activities has given rise to the rapid growth of third party logistics or 3PL. 3PL providers typically specialize in integrating warehousing and operation services that can be scaled and customized to a customer’s requirements. The use of 3PL has become a cost effective way for many businesses to reduce supply chain costs and increase customer satisfaction. With any logistics process, opportunities for human error exist resulting in misplaced or mis-directed inventory. However, with 3PL providers handling inventory for a multitude of customers, high levels of accuracy and efficiency as well as visibility within the operation have become critical requirements.
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Horticultural Tracking
Application Description
Horticultural tracking requirements place special demands on labels and tags. Long days in the hot sun, sudden downpours, wild temperature changes, and soil and fertilizer exposure can quickly compost typical label and tag products. However, the efficiency gained by accurately tracking plants through growth, care, and distribution does not have to degrade with the changing seasons. Intermec has the products and experience to enable reliable identification of these items from initial growth through final purchase.
Intermec Solution
For trees, shrubs, and vines, Intermec offers nursery tags in a variety of sizes, colors, and configurations. These self-locking tags shrug off outdoor conditions, allowing identification of these growing items from initial growth to final retail.
For pots, stakes, planters and other outdoor items, Intermec offers outdoor-durable labels and ribbons. Adhesives and label stocks that endure outdoor exposure for a year or more survive for the entire growing season; highly aggressive adhesives offer strong bonds on difficult-to-label items or tamper-evidence for retail labeling.
With Intermec thermal printers, these durable labels and tags can be custom-imaged onsite to meet immediate needs in the quantities required, eliminating long lead times and costly obsolescence. Colorful pre-printing can add logos, full-tint color, or provide simple solutions for large production quantities that do not need variable print.
Healthcare Unique Device Identification (UDI) Labeling
Industry Need
The FDA’s developing UDI (Unique Device Identification) standard highlights the capacity of auto-ID technologies to enable significant improvements in patient safety. Quick, effective recalls and adverse event reporting are difficult with current medical device management systems, and UDI is targeted to drive major enhancements. Pushing traceability to the device level enables manufacturers and users to quickly identify, locate, and pull recalled units from service; connecting adverse events to a unit serial number can reveal failure trends previously missed with manual checks.
The FDA is developing the unique attributes with input from the GHTF (Global Harmonization Task Force) for Automatic Data Collection of the device’s lot and serial number to maintain a chain of custody record for the life cycle of the Medical Device.
Additional benefits to full implementation include accurate device usage data yielding improved maintenance effectiveness. Direct input of device usage into electronic health records can provide significantly increased accuracy of patient service history and billing. Selecting the correct printers and media help ensure UDI labeling delivers the intended benefits in challenging healthcare environments.
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Intermec Advanced RFID Extensions (ARX)
Intermec introduces the first tag motion software toolkit in a standardized reporting format. Intermec Advanced RFID Extensions (ARX) effectively identifies RFID tags of interest and discriminates surrounding tags, providing customers and software integrators the tools to essentially eliminate false-positive reporting of tags.
Getting the Most out of RFID
RFID provides business benefits and a strong ROI for many applications including asset tracking, materials management, and inventory control. Many processes for identifying objects and recording their movements can be automated by RFID. Unattended readers ensure that asset and inventory movements are recorded and alerts issued if the material is moved to the wrong place or at the wrong time. With a well designed RFID system you know all the intimate details of where everything is, where it’s been and where it needs to go. By making your systems smarter, you will be able to:
- Realize huge improvements in asset and inventory visibility
- Resolve problems right when they occur
- Reduce capital and operations expenses
- Increase flexibility of your data collection systems
- Achieve new levels of productivity
RFID automated processes rely on the accuracy of reading the right tags: those that pass through a portal, are on a forklift, or are passing by a checkpoint on a conveyor. Because an RFID reader indiscriminately reads all of the tags that it activates, the presence of stray tags, such as those that pass through a nearby portal or are stationary on nearby racks or pallets, complicates the identification of the true tags of interest versus those that are not part of the process in action.
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E-Citation Printing
Industry Need
With increasing pressure on budgets, police and municipal operations are driven to increase productivity and revenues; citation programs pose a common target due to the high-touch environment. Adoption of e-citation among public safety agencies is rapidly increasing due to a quick ROI driven by increased accuracy, legibility (yielding decreased dismissals) and reduced or eliminated manual data entry. However, the ticketing environment has significant performance challenges. Hardware components such as computers or printers as well as citation media must often operate in punishing environments.
The two common E-citation applications have significantly different media requirements.
For parking and local ordinance violations, the citation must endure challenging service conditions. Vehicles are commonly unoccupied, requiring the parking enforcement agent to secure the ticket to the vehicle, often under a windshield wiper. These tickets are directly exposed to rain, snow, wind, and sunlight, conditions which can rapidly degrade common materials. Quick completion is a priority for efficiency; when agents encounter owners returning to a citation in progress, rapid execution is critical.
The time required to issue a citation is also important for moving violations. Drivers commonly complain about the time consumed when being cited. Additionally, exposure to moving traffic poses a safety hazard to both parked vehicles and officers, making rapid citation processing a top priority. While print quality requirements remain high, durability needs are lower since the printed citation is delivered directly from the officer to the driver.
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Durable Printing for Lockout/Tagout
Industry Need
Ensuring employee safety is a foundational focus of any world-class industrial operation. Fully functional equipment has well-documented procedures and robust safeguards in place to eliminate hazardous conditions. However, during installation and maintenance, significant additional risks such as exposed sources of electricity, mechanical force, or pneumatic/hydraulic pressure are encountered. These risks are mitigated by a well defined set of lockout/tagout policies. As a frequently cited OSHA violation in 2009, the importance of compliant and effective procedures to fully de-energize and communicate equipment status is underscored. Selecting the optimal printers and media to support lockout/tagout helps ensure success of this critical process.
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Cryogenic Sample Tracking
Industry Need
Modern life sciences commonly require long term preservation of biological material; cryogenic processing and storage provides a means to this end. With a large quantity of small samples in storage, accurate tracking is critical. Barcoded labels (with linear or 2D symbols) are the preferred method, but the extreme environmental stresses can cause failure with standard media.
Cryogenic conditions have become commonplace in multiple applications, ranging from pharmaceutical processing to lyophilization of vaccines. Cryopreservation of tissues and cell suspensions in small vials provides its own set of challenges, requiring conformability to small diameter surfaces and adhesion to low surface energy plastics such as polypropylene and polyethylene. Increasingly common cryogenic shipping of vaccines, tissues, and medicines in liquid nitrogen with temperatures as low as -112°F /-80°C now subjects a greater range of barcoded items to these stresses.
