Printing shipping labels should be easy as pie. But World Kitchen—a manufacturer of bakeware and other kitchen essentials—learned that without the proper tools this easy task becomes a troublesome chore.

World Kitchen used to buy glue-based label stock for its shipping labels. The glue, however, didn't react well to the 90-degree summer heat in the company's Monee, Ill., distribution center.

“We had to stage a pallet of labels in an air-conditioned room before we could use them,” says Terry Moore of World Kitchen's IT department. Otherwise, the glue got too soft and labels jammed in the printers.

At the advice of its systems integrator (PEAK Technologies), World Kitchen switched from glue-based to acrylic-based labels. Now, says Moore, temperature isn't a factor. No matter how hot it gets inside the DC, the labels don't get stuck in the printer, and after they're printed, they stay stuck to World Kitchen's products.

With label stock no longer a problem, World Kitchen began to focus on its outdated printers. The printers were producing poor quality bar codes, resulting in profit-eating chargebacks from customers who deemed them unreadable.

“We had no way to check the bar codes ourselves,” says Moore. “We couldn't have someone standing there with a handheld scanner checking every single label.”

So World Kitchen installed new thermal printers (Printronix) equipped with bar code verifiers. As soon as a bar code is printed, the verifier reads it and assigns it a quality grade. If the grade is worse than a B, the printer backtracks and reprints the label.

“The new printers basically eliminated our chargebacks,” says Moore.

In addition, the printers are designed for RFID upgradeability. So when World Kitchen's customers rolled out RFID mandates, adding RFID tags to shipping labels was easy as pie.