PlatformLabelling & traceability
Know — labelling & traceability
Traceability from label design to the check that consumed it.
Labelling is where traceability either happens or quietly doesn’t, and it usually fails because the label lives in one piece of software and the production record lives in another. SmartFactory owns the design, the print and the audit trail — so a recall investigation is a search, not an archaeology project.
Label designer
Design the label in the browser, at its real size.
Label design is usually a separate piece of software: its own licence, its own training, and one person in the building who knows how to drive it. Here it is a canvas in the same system that holds the works order and the stock movement.
- A true-size, millimetre-accurate canvas with text, barcodes, QR codes, images and shapes — what you lay out is what comes off the head.
- One design serves 203, 300 and 600 dpi printers, so moving a job to the other line does not mean redrawing the label.
- The symbologies manufacturing actually asks for: Code 128, GS1-128 with an application-identifier builder, Code 39, EAN-13, ITF-14, DataMatrix and QR.
- Templates are versioned immutably with restore, so a label printed in March can be reprinted in November exactly as it was.
- PDF proofs at exact physical size for offline sign-off — the customer approves the artwork before you commit a roll of media to it.
Printing you can trust
Paper out pauses the queue with a stated reason. It does not lose your work.
Every manufacturer has a story about a print run that silently vanished. This is the part of the system built to make sure it is not a story about us.
Identified by SNMP: Zebra ZT411-300dpi ZPL
- LB-88214 Batch labels · WO-2418 · 200 up Printed
- LB-88215 Batch labels · WO-2418 · 200 up Printing
- LB-88216 Pallet label · WO-2421 Queued
- LB-88217 Reprint · recall investigation Queued
A label reads Printed when the printer confirms it — not when the request returned.
- The print queue is durable: jobs are held until the printer confirms them, so a network blip or a reboot mid-batch costs you nothing.
- Paper out, head open or ribbon out pauses that printer’s queue with the reason on screen, and the queue drains by itself when the media is reloaded — no re-sending, no guessing what got through.
- Printing is asynchronous and honest about it: you get “12 jobs queued”, and a label reads Printed when the printer confirms it, not when the request returned.
- Idempotency keys mean an ERP that retries a request cannot double-print a run of five thousand labels.
- Failed jobs dead-letter with their error rather than disappearing, so somebody can see what happened and re-run it deliberately.
- Scheduled reports can print themselves at a shift boundary — the handover pack is on the printer before the shift walks past it.
Printer setup
Type in an IP. The printer tells you what it is.
- Enter an address and press Identify: make, model, resolution and language fill themselves in, with the evidence shown — “Identified by SNMP: Zebra ZT411-300dpi”.
- Probing is read-only and safest-first: standard printer MIBs over SNMP, then IPP attributes, and only then a Zebra status query — nothing is written to the printer to find out what it is.
- A swapped printer is caught: if the serial number at a known address changes, SmartFactory flags it rather than cheerfully printing 300 dpi artwork at 203.
- Sending a 300 dpi design to a 203 dpi head raises a warning before the batch, not a call from the customer afterwards.
- Office and A4 printing is driverless over IPP with a PDF fallback, so a report goes to the printer by the door without an IT ticket.
- Native ZPL to Zebra printers, or through your existing BarTender Enterprise setup where the artwork already lives there.
Traceability
From the template version to the check that consumed the label.
A label is only traceability if the system can still tell you, two years later, which template version printed it, which printer it came off and which check consumed it.
- Pre-generate labels in named batches of up to 5,000 with guaranteed-unique references, before the run starts.
- Every label moves through Generated → Printed → Used, so an unaccounted-for label is a question you can ask rather than a gap you discover.
- Each print job keeps its full history: which template version, which printer, which operator, when — identical reprints for a recall investigation included.
- Scanning a label at inspection ties the physical part to the check, the job, the machine and the shift that made it — automotive-grade traceability without the paper.
GS1 at the door
Your customer’s goods-in can scan our labels.
A label that does not scan at the far end becomes a line on somebody’s supplier report. These are proper GS1-128 element strings, built from the data the movement already holds.
- Receipt labels carry GTIN, batch or lot, expiry and count as real application identifiers — so material arriving at your door is scannable stock from the moment it is booked in.
- Despatch labels add SSCC pallet identifiers with a correctly computed check digit, and carry your customer’s own order number as its own element — the one their goods-in scanner is actually looking for.
- Serialised deliveries print one label per unit rather than one per pallet, each with its own serial, so the units stay individually traceable after they leave you.
- This is a supplier-qualification argument as much as a labelling one: scanning first time at a customer’s goods-in is the difference between a routine delivery and a conversation with their quality team.
- The thermal path is the authoritative one for GS1 artwork, and the screen says so rather than letting anyone sign off a barcode from a PDF proof.
- Labels are raised from the stock ledger itself at receipt and at despatch, so the label and the movement can never describe different things.
See your factory live in thirty minutes.
Book a demo and we’ll walk you through a running factory — or register for a free trial and get a simulated factory of your own to play with, the same day. No hardware, no card, no IT project.