Enterprise labeling solution centralizes label requirements

Trek Bicycle Corp. is a world leader in the manufacture and distribution of bicycles and cycling products through more than 5,000 independent dealers internationally. The company, headquartered in the United States, uses an enterprise labeling system to manage increasing customer demands, manufacturing processes, warehousing and inventory control and retail challenges. The centralized solution reduced label templates from 500 to 1 and prints more than 10 million customer labels globally.

The company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system consists of numerous modules for functional areas such as pricing, inventory and manufacturing. It interfaces with at least 10 other software solutions used throughout the enterprise and has more than 1,000 users in total. Labeling in the manufacturing process helps identify parts with orders, provide unique information and meet a variety of customer requirements. The company also generates a range of mission-critical labels including work order labels, configuration labels, inventory labels and shipping labels. Models, products and accessories change seasonally, which means customers require changes to existing labeling from a flexible labeling system.

Trek needed a solution to enable them to enter information and promptly generate labels in their warehouses that could be applied to bike boxes and used on site for shipping and receiving purposes. The new enterprise labeling solution (Loftware) allowed Trek to address evolving customer requirements and their complex labeling needs for manufacturing, warehousing and distribution.

The system’s centralized approach allows the company to integrate labeling processes with their existing ERP system to drive labeling directly from the customer’s transactions, offering consistency and greater control. The integration also retrieves data from other sources. The labeling solution’s business logic features removed a burden from IT by offering easily configurable label formatting and dynamic content to support different label combinations with a minimum number of label designs. Browser-based, on-demand print capabilities offer controlled access to label printing throughout operations in the warehouse and across the supply chain.

“Business users are able to make label changes if a dealer calls and wants to change the logo or change how the bar code looks or some sizing,” says Tom Spoke, global IT distribution manager at Trek. “It’s easy to do. We don’t even need to get involved from an IT standpoint. We’ve never had to focus our efforts on making sure that the labeling system works because it always has. We’ve run 10 million labels and our uptime is literally 100%.”