A SOLUTION FOR AFFORDABLE BARCODE PRINTING FOR PRINTERS

By: Norman Katz, Katzscan Inc.

I was contacted recently by a small printer located here in the South Florida area with a big problem:  it seems that he was outsourcing the printing of bar-coded materials to another vendor and the barcodes were not being printed with very good integrity.  To make matters worse, each document had a specific bar-coded identifier and the South Florida printer did not believe that the outsourcing company was following the identification scheme.  I was very familiar with the serialization scheme because I devised it for our mutual client.

The South Florida printer told me that his option of printing bar-coded materials in house was to purchase a high-end laser printer (i.e. a Hewlett-Packard 9000 series) and software.  The software he told me cost around $25,000, but would allow him to print the necessary barcodes and offered job tracking and perhaps other functions he didn’t think he needed.  Our mutual client is his largest customer, and he was rightfully concerned about the quality of his work, but even more concerned about the cost of bringing this in-house.  Knowing the consulting work I do, (barcode applications is one of my areas of expertise), he asked to engage my services to help him find another solution.

The solution I presented and implemented cost the South Florida printer approximately $750 for software and about the same amount in consulting & software setup time, aside from the cost of the HP 9000 printer.  My solution offers complete flexibility in the design of the printed materials and does not require any software programming.  Interested in knowing the solution I presented?  Read on!

Knowing that the HP 9000 printer is simply a big laser printer, I knew that I could use one of several off-the-shelf barcode design-and-print software packages readily available to accomplish this task.  Several companies offer very nice software packages, such as BarTender® (www.seagullscientific.com), LabelView® and Label Matrix® (www.teklynx.com) and Barcode 2000® (www.unibar.com), running around the $495 to $795 price range for a single-user version.  We used BarTender because it had the serialization scheme I had recommended for my client already built-in.  Basically, it is a “license-plate” type counting system, where, instead of simply counting from 0 to 9 for each character, this scheme counts from 0 to 9 and then A to Z before turning over the next character to the left.  I call this a “license-plate” scheme because this is how automobile license plates are serialized.

The South Florida printer was trying to put barcodes on a pre-printed 11” X 17” document – not a problem.  I simply setup an 11” X 17” document in the software and positioned the appropriate barcode and text fields in the correct places for printing.  A few test prints to make sure everything was aligned just right and we were in business! 

We added a little internal job control number that prints on each document run.  These software packages maintain their counters internally for each label/document, so we don’t have to track the serialization manually.  Also, we can enter parameters (user prompts) for each run, such as the job number or customer purchase order number, as well as the number of documents to print, including the number of duplicate copies of each document. 

Why would we enter the customer purchase order number or job number for each print run if that information is not to be printed on the document?  Well, these software packages have the capability of writing some or all of the printed information (you decide in the setup), whether internally controlled or entered via user prompt, to a data file for each document printed.  That data file can then be imported into a database like Microsoft Access® or a Microsoft Excel® spreadsheet to retain a record of the job number, customer, purchase order number, each serialized document number, etc.  

The trick here is to include information such as customer purchase order number on the document as a hidden or non-printed data field.  As such, this information is not physically printed on the document but will be written captured and written to the job transaction log file, which can then be imported into an Access database.  System data fields like date and time could also be captured depending on the functionality of the barcode design-and-print software package selected.  The South Florida printer did not use this data transaction logging feature of the BarTender software yet, but may have me come back to set this up in the future.

Perhaps needless to say, this South Florida printer is quite happy about his new and flexible printing capabilities, and is already considering how to offer barcode document printing to his other clients…..aside from the joy of saving around $25,000 and the relief of continuing to provide quality output for his largest customer.  He sat with me while I set up the document in the barcode software so he would know how to set up other documents for other customers; I believe in training my clients on their software as much as possible so they can take as much ownership of the solution as they can. 

The solution presented in this article brings to surface two important points:  First, for printers needing a solution to print barcodes on documents, there are several off-the-shelf software applications on the market that offer flexibility and features to handle about any task you could think of.  (In addition, barcode fonts are readily available and inexpensive to purchase if you have a custom software application that is running your printing operation.)

Second, it highlights an “out-of-the-box” solution.  Not out of the product box, but outside of the thought-process box.  The South Florida printer was only looking within his scope of vision for a solution, and fortunately had the insight to contact someone who is not a printing industry expert, but a business applications expert specializing in the needed area of information. 

This thought process applies equally to inventory control, asset management, scheduled maintenance and repair, and a host of other business application needs.  The best solution might not be one that is marketed within a specific industry, but it might take a person who understands both the business need and the software application options to see the proverbial forest through the trees.

Copyright (c) 2003 - Katzscan Inc.