Allen Coding: Checklist for greater process flexibility

To manufacture food products, all of the relevant product information must be provided such as ingredients, filling amounts and traceability. Printing with codes, batch numbers, best-by dates, etc. is therefore an important part of the food supply chain. The following checklist helps to arrange your labelling process in a way that is both flexible and simultaneously efficient:

1. Consider prior to the start of production what events or results could endanger the flexibility and efficiency of the labelling process.
2. Consider the time-related, financial and staff-related expenditures that necessary adaptations in your product labelling could cause.
3. Carefully plan set-up times to en-sure that these conversions can run quickly and smoothly with the least simultaneous material expenditure.
4. Integrate the printing system into your production system – both physically and in terms of suitable software.
5. Ensure not only an automatic database connection, but also the easy-to-manage simple configurability of your printer software.
6. Update your printer software regularly in order to ensure its flexible, smooth implementation in your production process.
7. Find a professional partner early on for printing systems and/or product labelling.

This checklist is an excerpt from the guidelines of Allen Coding GmbH: “Flexibly Planning Food Labelling in the Production Process”.