Why Your Warehouse Needs Mobile Printing

Businesses can apply the time savings and labelling accuracy benefits that mobile printers provide to many common warehouse processes, including receiving, quality assurance, cross docking, putaway, picking, packaging, and shipping. Mobile or cart-based printers can go wherever workers go. Work areas that require the farthest travel to get labels, or operations that could benefit from improved accuracy, are the best candidates to support with mobile printing. The sections that follow detail ways mobile printing technology can support typical warehouse operations.

1. Improve Receiving Dock Productivity

It is common practice for organizations to print batches of labels for incoming goods at a central IT office after receiving an advance ship notice (ASN) from a supplier. The labels are stored in the office and retrieved by a receiving worker when the shipment arrives. This process requires the receiving worker to make a time-consuming round trip between the dock and the office, and creates the possibility that a worker might apply wrong labels to the shipment.

Eliminating this process is a major way mobile printers can produce productivity gains and accuracy improvements. Workers can use forklift-mounted mobile printers to apply barcode labels on incoming materials immediately as they are unloaded. This procedure ensures items are prepared for scanning and other automated processing systems in place at the facility. Labelling items at the receiving area also ensures that 100 percent of incoming materials receive barcodes, so that barcode-based check-in, putaway, conveyor, and other automated applications remain fully leveraged and provide maximum benefits. In the receiving yard or other outdoor locations, workers can label large, bulky items and cargo containers because mobile printers are available for indoor and outdoor use.

2. Advanced Quality Assurance Tasks

At the QA station, inspectors can take advantage of mobile printers to create clear, legible labels to identify samples taken for quality assurance. Workers can pull items from incoming shipments or from inventory and apply a tracking label tag. Then, as the sample routes through testing, the label serves as a work order indicating the required tests the lab must perform. Quality assurance workers could also use mobile printers to clearly identify samples with “pass,” “rework,” or “reject” labels. Using a mobile printer can virtually eliminate the chance of misidentified items— thereby avoiding quality problems.

Useful Reading: How Switching to Mobile Printing Delivers Real Results

3. Streamline Cross Docking

Warehousing operations use cross docking to save time in receiving and redistribution. Mobile printing presents the optimal solution for this environment because it saves steps for receiving personnel. Shipping and receiving workers equipped with mobile computers, barcode/RFID scanners, and label printers can receive inbound shipments and log them into the host warehouse or inventory control system with the mobile computer. Once logged, they can then use the mobile printer to quickly generate a barcode or RFID shipping label with the required cross-dock information. Point-of-activity labelling provides the accuracy needed to process fast-moving items, without adding delays.

Useful Reading: Best Practice Inventory Control Techniques

4. Fufill and Track Ship-to-Order Operations

Businesses can leverage a similar application to manage ship-to-order operations. Rather than identifying and labelling final assemblies, workers use barcode labelling and scanning to verify the picking and packing of all items required to complete the order. Shipping departments can label items with an order code during picking, or at a packing area to associate them with specific orders. Prior to shipping, a worker in the packaging or shipping department scans the barcode label on each item and system software alerts the operator if any items are missing or duplicated. After final order assembly or completion, the worker can use a mobile printer to generate a shipping label. This application ensures packing of the correct items into an order and that the order includes identification with the proper shipping label.

If you have any questions about mobile printing, please do not hesitate to contact our team of experts here.

ADC Barcode is involved in the supply of barcode scanners, barcode label printers, barcode verifiers and label applicators. We also provide custom software, EPOS systems & hardware, RFID and wireless networking technology amongst other professional services. Get in touch now and obtain more information.