Outsourcing of (bar code) printing

In many industrial environments the use of templates with (bar) code symbols is needed. A problem is the number of templates or booklets. Often only a few number is required, so asking a printing office to print just one or two booklets or templates on their huge presses is too expensive. Also bringing a few DTP-skilled employees into action including their soft and hardware, plotters and so on. Outsourcing of all this work to a specialised print shop can and will be a perfect solution.

Epsilon Printing Service

Dutch city of Weesp based Bert van Ees, managing director of Epsilon Printing Services, can tell you a lot of stories about entrepreneurs and managers who have tried themselves (and don’t ask the amount of costs) to realise the required printed matters. At the end they came to him to get their single printed matters in large formats, mostly on laminated self adhesive labels to be used in their companies or on behalf of their companies. Van Ees is specialised in many kinds of printed matters in single editions. Going from one page with announcements up to departure cards for busstops in the streets, etc. He knows about many companies who have weekly announcements in their offices and workrooms, of which the contents change but not the used kind of paper. Which should be dirt and moisture proof, in a specific colour and being printed with a special font. It happens all the time that the content differs per label, so for many labels everytime a new lay out has to be designed. Which lead to very much work for that one DTP-employee and his valuable soft and hardware, which makes the relatively simple announcements and templates very expensive. “The secret of the solution is having a database which contents all the lay outs needed and the possibility to change in a few seconds a single lay out”, Van Ees explains. When a company hands over its information for this database to Epsilon Printing Service, Van Ees takes care of printing any label or form in the quantity and quality the customer needs. “Which lead to highly savings at the customer’s since he only pays us for the real printing costs”, he says. It only might be extended with a few euro’s for keeping also the database up-to-date.

Enthusiast

Van Ees himself is rather enthusiast about the departure cards for busstops etc. “Only in The Netherlands we have tens of thousands of these cards carrying stopping times of busses and tramways”, he knows. Every stop only needs one card but mostly with information about more than one route. It is also a hard job to select per card the right information of all routes and destinations. “We have developed special software for that task”, Van Ees explains and with that he can produce for every card the correct information. Including stopping times per route and destination. And than the Epsilon printers produce all the needed cards in a very efficient way, make sure they are laminated and self adhesive for applying on the stopsigns. “For us, it is really an easy job, but many public transport companies remain to produce the cards themselves”, Van Ees says. He is however not surprised when the companies turn to him after a while to have the cards printed. “They find out that there is a lot of savings to make in what you might call a secondary product”, the printing specialist knows.

Bar code books

It is the same with users of so-called bar code books or templates. Many retailers like supermarkets and large department stores have stowed all their goods information into the shop’s computers and brought shelf cards including bar codes onto the shelves. When employees want to make a stock inventory, they only need to scan the bar code on the shelf cards and their terminaldisplays present the right good’s name and article number. But then the employee need to put into the terminal the number of articles to be ordered. “That is when you need a template, a booklet which contains the same bar code next to an eye readable article name and also a group of bar codes containing ordering number files. Your employee carries in one hand the terminal with in-build scanner and in the other hand his bar code book. He can’t fill in the ordered numbers by keyboard – so there wont be any mistakes – but he scans them via the template. In this way an absolutely error free order is made”, Van Ees explains. It is his experience that this way of scanning is also very effective at Point of Sale-stations and in call centres, where large numbers of articles are ordered by phone. “The telephone operator just can scan the bar codes on his template and doesn’t need to write all the information on a sheet of paper”, according to Van Ees. He also knows that many companies using this kind of information entrance, use software which translates the scanned information into picking orders for the warehouse managers. “It saves them a lot of time and errors”, he knows, also knowing that again making the templates is a problem for the company.

Also ID-cards and genealogical registers

The possibilities of a printing service include more than just bar code templates. Van Ees supplies for instance clubs with membercards, companies with employees cards and libraries with membercards also. Including bar code on the card’s backside and imprinted photopicture. The image is digitised and stored in the Epsilon computer. It saves many clubs and companies money not having their own digitising and printing system. They only need a server with ID-database and scanners or imagers at the entrance. Nobody, faulting its ID-card can pass this system without warning, because his picture and bar code information is not stored in the database. Another possibility for many individuals is having a nice printed book with for example genealogical information. “Many times these books are just printed in a few editions”, Van Ees knows. It is obviously too expensive to have these books printed by a book press office. But the professional print shop can do this job for you in a much nicer way than doing it yourself on a computer printer. Not only for genealogical books however, also for Yearly Books, Family Memorial Books, Company Memorial Books, music parts, etc. “Outsourcing of specialised print work is always cheaper than you can imagine, including the high quality of the printed work”, according to Bert van Ees.

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