600 correctly printed labels for Tesco – in an hour?

One of our clients, Gareth had a problem.  He had 600 packs of his premium pet food sitting in Goods In at Tesco’s Bolton distribution centre.  He had worked long and hard to win the Tesco’s account and now his credibility with this prestigious account was in jeopardy.  He was under pressure and did not want to upset this account.  He needed 600 barcode labels urgently.

Gareth’s original supplier had made a mistake with their barcode and this had been rejected by Tesco,  With the label unscannable, the goods couldn’t be booked in and Tesco were threatening to return the consignment.  Gareth had to act fast.

He needed 600 replacement labels – but he didn’t know where to start.  He didn’t know what kind of barcode he needed – all he knew was that he needed them and he needed them fast.  He started to phone possible suppliers – looking for solutions.

That’s when he reached us – on an afternoon in November.  Gareth explained the situation and asked what could be done.  The question for us – was do we have the label he needed on the shelf.  Secondly, we needed to confirm the type of barcode he needed and then could we print it ready for him to pick up that afternoon.

Gareth emailed us across a picture of the label, along with the dimensions he needed.

Luckily we hold a few hundred rolls of labels on the shelf in our office.  Whilst that sounds like a lot, when you consider all the combinations of size, material, adhesive, finish and colour, that’s a small selection of what we get asked for on a weekly basis.  But, Gareth had a problem and he could adjust his label size to match what we had on the shelf.

In a few minutes we’d found a suitable label match so we started work on printing a sample barcode.  Gareth had sent us across an image of the barcode he needed.  Having worked with barcodes for more than twenty years we could tell at a glance what kind of barcode he needed.  The GS1 128 barcode is easy to recognise, but we weren’t going to take any chances.  Gareth already had a problem and we didn’t want to make another mistake by printing the wrong barcode.

We have a barcode terminal in our office we use for identifying barcodes.  One scan with that confirmed our expectations.  Gareth needed 600 GS1 128 barcodes.

In twenty minutes we had a sample designed on BarTender, our label design software and we printed it out on our Zebra ZM400 printer.  A quick photo showed Gareth exactly what he was going to get and we emailed it across for him to check and approve.

A short while later Gareth had checked with his bosses and the barcode was exactly what they needed.  How quickly could we get it done?  It’d be ready in 30 minutes.  That gave us time to test, print and rewind the roll of printed labels.

We set up the printer, loaded the core onto the rewind unit and began printing.

Job done.  Thanks Gareth for trusting us – and I’m glad it worked out for you!