What’s the hold up? Our survey findings on production shutdowns and how to keep your operation humming along.

In today’s face-paced business economy, speed is everything and every second counts, especially when you’re talking about the supply chain where delays quickly translate to lost revenue.  

NiceLabel & Loftware recently surveyed 300 IT directors in manufacturing across the US, UK, France and Germany. The survey found that on average more than two-thirds of manufacturers (67%) were having to shut down their production line for more than an hour if there was a problem with label printing. Seventy seven percent said their production line had to be paused four times or more in the past year as a consequence of label related issues.  

While this is clearly a serious problem for any manufacturer, the risks to production operations extend well beyond shutdowns. Decentralized labeling for example, also adds risk to production operations. However, an ERP system provides “a single source of truth” for business users so they can access accurate and approved content for labels. Although, many organizations still maintain as many versions of truth as they have labeling facilities. This is because with decentralized labeling operations, each facility may not be integrated with the company ERP to gain access to accurate and consistent data and therefore end up creating redundancies by developing their own label formats and duplicating product and customer data. 

These findings underline the importance of manufacturers avoiding costly production shutdowns; each time a production line is not working it is losing money. Beyond this, however, they also highlight the importance of manufacturers modernizing their labeling systems, as part of a seamless process of digital transformation. 

A key part of this transformation is making it as easy as possible for cloud-based business systems including cloud-based ERPs, warehouse management systems (WMS) and MES systems to integrate with cloud-based labeling systems typically via cloud connector APIs. With tight integration between these systems, you can count on accurate label data and fewer error-related production shutdowns.  

In the current era where customers have more choices and less loyalty than ever before, it is critical that businesses keep operations humming along and deliver products on time.  

Learn more about what the survey respondents had to say in our survey research e-book.