Siemens Standardizes Labeling Across its Global Factories to Drive New Levels of Efficiency

Siemens’ labeling-as-a-service solution, powered by NiceLabel’s LMS provides centralized labeling that can easily deliver critical real-time labels to highly automated manufacturing and logistics environments.

The Manufacturing Operations Service Delivery department within Siemens has a straightforward objective. The department is responsible for IT for all the systems, infrastructure and architecture that enable Siemens to manufacture products across their factories. Their goal is to provide IT systems and services that perform in as standardized and efficient a manner as possible, applying best practices to make sure things run as they should.

Case Study Challenges

“We sit within a network of Motion Control factories, and even at our main site there were three different labeling solutions.” Leon McDonnell, Service Delivery Manager

Leon McDonnell, Service Delivery Manager McCormick is also looking to extend labeling outside its four walls to include suppliers, co-packers, and other partners who can print labels locally. This will eliminate the costly, error-prone method of pre-printing and shipping labels to partners.and future requirements. End-to-end, data-driven labeling helps enable the precise tracking and tracing.

Fragmented landscape poses barrier to best practice

One of the areas the group was looking to standardize was on-demand label printing in the factories. However, the Siemens environment at the time made this effort challenging. “Five years ago, the labeling set-up was heterogeneous and complex,” relates Leon McDonnell, Service Delivery Manager, Manufacturing Operations for the Motion Control Business. “We sit within a network of Motion Control factories, and even at our main site there were three different labeling solutions. More broadly speaking, there were five or six solutions to print labels.” Some solutions were off-the shelf and others were developed locally and only for specific vendors. Applying best practices was out of the question with the current set-up, as each factory had a tailored solution.

There was also a wide range of label and office printers at each factory. “A lot of these factories had been masters of their own domains and followed their own purchasing or hardware approach. You can imagine any variable, and we would have found variants of that variable across the factories,” comments Leon.

Multilingual labels a challenge

As Siemens is an international organization, they need to produce labels in multiple languages. The labeling solutions couldn’t consistently handle Chinese characters and in some cases the designers had to transform them into pictures. At one point, they had 250 pictures they had to maintain. Having to maintain a variety of hard-coded layouts slowed down the label change process and placed a heavy burden on the IT department. In the worst case, they would have to alter hundreds of hard-coded layouts manually in the event of a change request. Factories hard-coded the same label format several times in order to accommodate the requirements of the different systems and printer brands they had in place.

Learn more with Loftware.