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 Loftware, Inc
166 Corporate Drive
Portsmouth, NH 03801
P: +603.766.3630
F: +603.766.3631

UK Office
Abbey House
Brooklands Business Park
Wellington Way, Weybridge
Surrey
KT13 0TT
P: +44 (0) 1932 268470
F: +44 (0) 1932 268600


   Case Studies

Igloo Products Corp.

Houston, Texas

The Challenge: Integrated Label Printing for High-Volume Distribution Centers
When Igloo, a leading manufacturer of coolers and other thermal products worldwide, replaced its legacy mainframe enterprise resource planning (ERP) with Oracle"s warehouse management system (WMS), it realized first-hand the importance of tight integration with barcode label printing software. Igloo had been successfully printing batches of labels from the Loftware Print Server, but it had difficulty printing from Oracle's WMS. Aby Joy, Igloo's Oracle Project Manager, needed an integrated label printing solution with his new WMS that could efficiently and accurately deliver labels at his busy distribution centers in volumes that could exceed 100,000 a day. But, "There wasn't a whole lot of pre-built integration."

Loftware's Solution: Connecting Label Printing Easily to Drive Operational Efficiency
To achieve the high levels of label printing performance the company required, Igloo selected and installed the Loftware Connector, specifically written to integrate Oracle and Loftware technology. Three new features made possible by the seamless integration of the Loftware Print Server and Oracle's WMS significantly enhanced Igloo's distribution operations. First, the WMS organizes a single, large print job of serveral thousand labels, now in the correct order. Second, filtering capabilities gives users greater control over prints jobs, with label grouping and database look-ups, before they go to the Loftware Print Server. And, third, printer pooling minimizes downtime. The robustness of the Loftware Print Server and the Connector offer peace of mind that Igloo operations are optimized: "Now, they can submit the print job and forget about it.”

With more precise control over barcode label printing, Igloo experienced clear improvements in picking and loading at its distribution centers. Pallets, each containing 50-100 cartons, are unpacked and loaded onto trucks, and each truck holds up to 60 pallets worth of cartons. Penalties charged by Igloo's shipping carriers gave the company a major incentive to avoid delays. A time study showed that the average time to generate a label dropped from 14 minutes to two.

The Benefits to Manufacturing: Improving Operations With Integrated, Fast and Reliable Label Printing
As with all leading manufacturing companies, barcode label printing is a critical part of Igloo's operations to help drive efficiency in its high-volume distribution facilities. With Loftware Print Server and Connector, Mr. Joy and Igloo have experienced:

  • High-volume reliability and accuracy, to meet Igloo's time-sensitive, large-scale and multi-site distribution requirements
  • Robustness, for maximum throughput at the company's distribution facilities
  • Flexibility, to easily integrate with the company's WMS of choice
  • On-demand and centralized control, for immediate visibility across the entirety of the company's distribution operations

For more information about the label printing solution described at Igloo or any of the proven products in Loftware's suite of labeling software and tools for barcode and RFID marking, please contact us today.