View original at www.manufacturing.net

Mike Hess Automation is an important component on the shop floor. Manufacturers have improved efficiency and consistency by turning repeatable processes over to robotics systems and other automated equipment, saving time, labor, and reducing errors. Post-production processes like packaging and shipping, however, often still involve a mix of manual and automated processes. This can create a bottleneck on the back end of your manufacturing or fulfillment operations that can erode efficiency gains made in the manufacturing environment. Extending your automation efforts across these post-production operations can help increase your operational velocity, while also boosting productivity and accuracy. The post-production environment offers a number of opportunities to make a positive impact without creating significant disruptions during deployment. Here are three areas where a relatively small investment in automation can generate big efficiency gains: Printer-to-Scale Integration As shipping costs rise and third-party logistics providers tighten up their requirements on weight and dimensioning, scales play an even more important role in getting your products to your customers. Whether you use pallet scales, counting scales, or highly sensitive laboratory scales, getting weight information on to your product or shipping labels is an important part of the manufacturing and shipping process. Unfortunately, that process is often primarily manual. Scale information has to be keyed into the labeling program or other software before the label is created. Printer-to-scale integration, however, can eliminate this step. Scale and printer integration will allow your enterprise to effortlessly print labels and tags that include unique weight measurements for each product, carton, and pallet at the touch of a button, improving productivity. By extending that integration into enterprise resource planning (ERP), warehouse management and other software systems, companies can also eliminate additional redundant data entry and associated errors while further improving label accuracy. In some cases, the scale information can […]