Case Study - Elite Labels

Elite Labels

A leading supplier in the label market, with a strong commitment towards quality and an innovative approach to meet the demands of the ever-changing trends in labelling concepts. Elite Labels pride themselves on delivering excellence for their customers with a complete “in house” service, delivering swift responses, speedy sampling and lightening fast turnarounds for all their production jobs, whether clients are large or small.

Automation to increase efficiency and reduce time

Elite Labels produce point of sale, adhesive, care and woven labels for many large high street retailers. On a daily basis retailers electronically transmit their orders directly to Elite and their network of worldwide garment suppliers.

Suppliers then needed to order their packaging from Elite Labels by phone, email or fax...quite a time consuming task, involving details such as packaging types, variable data such as additional care instructions and composition, etc, quantities and finally nominating a delivery address.

Elite Labels tasked Breeze with automating the entire process to reduce turnaround times and also drastically reduce print and data errors associated with the multiple handling of data.

Our Approach

Our goal was to drastically reduce the time from order to packaging delivery, increasing overall efficiency and reducing the potential for data errors.

Working closely with Elite Labels, we first produced an initial specification and built a functional prototype to demonstrate how we could automate and streamline the process.

Using Microsoft ASP.NET, SQL Server 2005 and iText pdf generation, Breeze developed a 3 tier solution:

1. An automated pickup and import into a SQL Server database of the retailer's contract file to eliminate data entry errors.
2. A secure web based application (for worldwide, 24/7 access) allowing garment suppliers to enter their variable, quantity and delivery information directly against the original retailer data; again eliminating data entry errors and miscommunication.
3. A unique artwork origination module that combines both the label specification and variable data into a print ready PDF document delivered directly to the overseas print facility.

The Results

The project was a complete success. As predicted the timeline from order to packaging delivery (a critical measure in the retail environment) was drastically reduced. Data errors were eliminated and artwork origination significantly reduced. Overall efficiency increased and costs were reduced.