Industrial printing for tracking

Tracking items is an exact science with university degrees dedicated to supply chain management. Millions of tracking labels with codes and barcodes are printed each week around the world, these are used to track items including components as well as finished items and of course every size of shipment from a single carton up to a container. Items can be tracked around the world scanned at regular intervals and even then tracked by GPS once you know what container ship or lorry they are on.

What is the point of tracking items though, can they not just be sent from place to place each time arriving unexpectedly by the next warehouse, manufacturer, retailer or transport company who then have to work out what they have in a carton or pallet and where it should be going? Well that last question answered itself, there is a lot of information about any shipment or item that can be recorded and accessed once you can join up a barcode with a computer file. Computer files can instantly be accessed on intranets from around the world allowing companies to plan and organise and stop items just getting lost.

It can happen that items get left and forgotten about, sometimes barcodes aren’t scanned or labels are lost, this would happen far more without tracking though: a delivery coming in to a warehouse due to be sent out but put behind another delivery and forgotten.

Many companies including retailers and manufacturers use just in time systems to get respectively products on the shop floor or components on to a factory floor just as they are needed. Just in time cuts costs because less warehousing is needed and less money is tied up in stock, also holding less perishables means less risk.

With just in time though items may need to be tracked from manufacturer so companies can plan around what they will have and when or they feed data back to suppliers who then know who needs what, items can then be tracked while in transit.
Warehouses supplying on a just in time basis may hold stock themselves and then need to send it out as data comes in, they must know what stock they have and where that stock is. Often stock in warehouses isn’t instantly accessible, often hidden away on carousels or behind other items, using a barcode on a pallet and a barcode on a location means a system can tell warehouse workers or even robots where the products they need are. With perishable items such as organic produce there is an extra dimension as item must be rotated to ensure that the oldest produce is shipped first.

Items are tracked right down the supply chain, sometimes even traced once they have been used and are disposed of. Traceability though is also important going back up the supply chain. If a product is found to have a flaw it is important to find where that flaw came from, it could be several steps back but often even the smallest components are labelled and the batch they are from can be checked and then the exact location of items affected found so they can be withdrawn.

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