Print Management System (PMS)

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Manage all your labels in one secure database

Countless organizations still struggle with label versioning/approval processes and manual quality assurance procedures. These legacy approaches to quality control are costly, error-prone and fail to satisfy many industry regulations, increasing the risks of mislabeling resulting in product quarantine, rework, scrappage, recall, fines and even lost business.    

Loftware's Document Management System (DMS) is a modern HTML web-based application that stores all label documents and configurations in a central database.

• An integral part of the Label Management System, the DMS handles moving label design templates into production. It is the quality assurance and traceability tool that you use to manage and gain visibility into all phases of your labeling process.
• Similar to Microsoft SharePoint, but built for labeling, the NiceLabel DMS offers an intuitive, easy approach to centrally controlling your entire labeling process.    

Secure centralized storage eliminates duplication

All label documents are stored in a central SQL database. Users check-in and check-out documents from our label designer to prevent conflicts if multiple individuals attempt to edit the same document at the same time.

 
Automatic document versioning provides transparency

Version control gives you a complete template and change request history for backup and audit purposes.

 
Template consolidation leads to more efficient operations

Loftware's intelligent templates are optimized for over 5,000+ printer models, reducing the number of label variations you need to maintain.

 
Unique indexing and search helps reduce duplications

All elements contained in the label template are indexed so business users can quickly find, visually compare and modify templates. Searches cover the entire database, helping you avoid redundant or duplicated label variations.

Secure, electronic approval workflows

The publishing approval workflow automates the routing of label documents to quality control managers for review and approval. Stakeholders are automatically notified via an email sent directly from the DMS. They can compare, approve or reject changes right in the system.

Label comparison provides quality assurance

The label compare feature automatically compares two label revisions and graphically highlights the differences. You can easily spot differences not readily apparent to the naked eye, and attain a higher level of quality control.

Keep full control of all label changes

Make label changes in a test environment and preview these changes before they go live in the production environment. This protects the core label data and ensures no unchecked changes are published in the live database. You get full control over how and when changes are published to make sure the information is correct and the organization is informed.

Our DMS enables new levels of traceability and visibility

The DMS history feature keeps a graphical view and data record for every label ever printed across your entire organization. History also keeps records of all system errors, events and alerts. It provides the necessary audit trails and documentation to comply with regulatory requirements. The DMS reports feature gives you the information you need to improve and fine-tune your production processes and compare the workload across servers, users and printers.

Secure your labeling process with role-based access control

Quality management systems and regulatory agencies often require comprehensive documentation and audit trails regarding your labeling processes. With our Label Management System, administrators get full control over who has access to specific labeling processes and can determine which level of access each user has. Role-based access control (RBAC) regulates access to documents and resources based on the roles of individual users. RBAC is supported using Windows Active Directory authentication.

Avoid unplanned downtime with printer management and alerts

Unscheduled downtime can mean costly delays for your business. The Loftware Label Management System includes printer management features and alerts that provide a real-time overview of all connected printers, active print jobs and connected clients. With this information, IT support can quickly resolve downtime issues. Administrators receive automatic email notifications when errors occur and address these immediately.

Request a demo to see how LMS complies with quality management systems.

Templates are unique documents and designing them with tools not built for the job can be challenging. Our designer makes this task easy for business users. It's packed with built-in graphical design features that enable users to create templates  in minutes, no coding skills or training necessary. 

Designing templates within our system helps your business achieve:

• Improved speed and flexibility in making label changes
• Streamlined compliance with regulatory requirements
• Faster global optimization and expansion into new markets
• Improved customer retention and new customer acquisition

Empower business users to design labels

With the Print Management System, business users can design and maintain customer-specific or regulatory-compliant label templates. This reduces the need for IT involvement in order to process and complete change requests, freeing up valuable IT resources to work on more value-adding projects.

The most modern label designer for business

The designer delivers a familiar, Microsoft Word-like user experience. This means business users can quickly design professional templates without barcoding knowledge, design layout expertise or advanced computer skills. Use one of the pre-designed templates or create one from scratch in minutes, even if you have never designed a label before.

The designer enables the design of universal, intelligent templates with dynamic content. Even the most complex templates such as GHS, allergens and nutrition or garment care templates can be designed quickly and linked to dynamic data sources.

Loftware's templates are universal. You can use the same template with any printer brand and model, even printers with different resolutions. You don’t need to design different templates for different printer models to get the same consistent output and fast printing performance.

Unrivaled text formatting

Loftware automatically positions, aligns, word wraps or adjusts the font size of your text to ensure your dynamic data fits into the designated area.

Multi-lingual support

Loftware's user interface, help system and user guides are available in many languages. Template content can by printed in any language with multiple languages appearing on the same template.

Flexible templates

Intelligent features like relative object positioning, variable label length and double-sided printing help reduce the number of template variations you need to create.

Design intelligent labels

Guidelines, relative positioning, anchoring, alignment, grouping and other features help you quickly design dynamic and intelligent labels that help reduce label template variations.

All the help you need

The designer provides a comprehensive help system with shortcuts, user guides, training videos, knowledge base, sample files, on-screen hints and error warnings to ensure you get all the help you need to quickly create accurate templates.

Pre-built compliance templates

The designer includes a library of pre-built labels that align with industry standards like GS1, AIAG, ODETTE, GM, VDA, etc.

Fast and simple database connectivity

Anyone can connect to a database using our designer’s database wizard.

• Easily connect to Excel, Access and text files
• Connect to SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL
• OLE DB and ODBC provide connectivity to almost any other database
• Connection to multiple databases and tables on the same template
• Import dynamic graphics from databases (BLOB)
• Custom SQL data queries for advanced queries

Easily configure dynamic data

The designer lets you configure dynamic data using menus rather than coding.

• Configurable variables, data-entry rules and error checking
• GS1-128 barcode wizard for shipper box templates
• Functions for easy manipulation and concatenation of dynamic data
• Advanced VB or Python scripting for custom or special needs

Download the free 30 day trial and see how easy it is to get started.

Printing forms provide operator accuracy and efficiency and reduce risks of errors when printing from the design program.

The Loftware design program automatically generates a printing form for every template created. The standard printing form provides the print operator all key functions in the printing solution interface, such as:

Template preview

• Inspect one or many templates prior to starting the print job

Database table

• Database search
• Database view
• Select one or multiple products
• Select variable quantity for each product selected

Manual data entry fields

• One or multiple manual data entry fields

Printer

• Select printer
• Printer settings

The Loftware designer program includes an application builder to allow business users to either edit the standard printing form, or create new custom printing and data entry solutions.

See the next section to learn more about the on-demand printing builder.

Businesses can significantly reduce manual printing effort and achieve new levels of accuracy and control by using PowerForms unmatched on-demand print capabilities. PowerForms features empower business users to create custom printing applications, streamline complex printing processes and eliminating errors. 

Users can initiate on-demand printing via a simple scan, touch or minimal data entry and preview the results to ensure accuracy and speed of printing. Label preview offers a visual aide, displaying the entire print job to provide verification to reduce the occurrence of misprinting. This all helps remove the “guess work” from the print operator while reducing the occurrence of misprinting.

Make it easy for non-skilled or seasonal workers to print your templates. Build a printing solution that uses images and icons to replace text or use buttons and touchscreen to remove the need for keyboard skills. You can rapidly onboard new print operators with minimal to no training.

Custom forms allow end users to make the necessary decisions to print exactly what they want, when they want it, without deviating from a standard process or workflow. This reduces the manual printing efforts, improves the speed of printing and print productivity.

When operators use printing forms, they don't have access to the label template, so they can't accidentally or intentionally modify the label layout or important label content. 

Download the free day 30 trial and see how easy it is to build your on-demand printing solutions.

The web printing system allows you to instantly deploy a standardized printing process across departments, factories, locations and even business partners. Operators print from a dedicated, streamlined application that requires little training. Our web printing system reduces IT costs because there is no need to deploy printing applications for each workstation at every printing site. 

Web printing increases organizational efficiency, enabling a faster time-to-market.

Web Client assures consistent printing and accurate data to streamline and automate the operations by:

• Instantly deploying consistent applications and printing while reducing IT costs.
• Extending standardized printing to suppliers to avoid relabeling at goods receiving.
• Immediately rolling out template and application updates across all locations without IT assistance.

Standard printing solutions

Loftware automatically generates a printing form for each template.  The standard printing form can be deployed via the web printing system without any programming.  The only limitation is that you need to create multiple web clients in the DMS for print operators to print multiple templates.

Edit the standard printing solution

Use the on-demand application builder tool to edit the standard printing form to support multiple templates in a single solution.  Then deploy to all print operators a single multi-template solution from a single web client in the DMS.

Custom printing and date entry solutions

Use the application builder to create custom printing and data entry solutions.  Then deploy to all business users from a single web client.

The web printing system is the only web printing solution that utilizes client-side processing and client-side printer management. Instead of generating print streams and previews from the remote server, a method that can be slow due to time lag and network traffic, client-side processing generates print streams and print previews using the local PC. Client-side printer management allows local users to use any Microsoft Windows printer driver, including ones not supported by the server, and control the settings locally.

Collaborate with your suppliers to eliminate the need for goods-in relabelling. Give contract manufacturers and 3PLs access to labelling, while you maintain control centrally. Business partners can have access to a manual web printing solution or they can integrate the web printing form with their ERP system. They can deploy a standardised printing process and ensure consistent labels regardless of printer. The result is a faster time-to-market because goods can be received more quickly.

Call for a live demo and you will printing via the web client in minutes.

If you’ve integrated your printing with your ERP system or other business applications, you’ve taken the first step towards a more efficient label production process.

However, if you’re hard-coding templates to match the printers in your organization, you’re probably still struggling with maintaining a large number of templates that have to be manually updated by your IT team.

The main goal of any integration is to ensure accuracy and efficiency by interfacing with the master data. Our Print Management System enables you to achieve the highest level of integration quickly at much lower cost than with legacy approaches to integration.

Loftware’s integration system includes

• Intuitive graphical integration builder for building integrations without any coding
• Pre-built integrations to leading business applications for rapid deployment
• NiceLabel ABAP package for rapid and seamless SAP integration
• Triggers that accept data from any protocol
• Filters that integrate with all modern and legacy data formats
• Actions for building business rules and workflows
• Next generation 64-bit print server that meets performance and scaling needs by consuming minimal system resources

All-in-one integration system

Our integration system includes data connectors (triggers), data extraction and transformation (filters), business rules and workflows (actions), and a print server in a single service. All transactions and data processing happen in the same memory space. In-memory processing is 100x faster than transmitting data between applications and servers.  The all-in-one architecture also reduces downtime and simplifies maintenance.

Pre-built integration to leading business applications

Designed to meet the integration needs of businesses of all sizes, our integration system provides unrivalled connectivity to any application or source data via web services, event based integration and certified pre-built integrations to SAP®, Oracle®, Microsoft® and many other leading MES, ERP and WMS applications.

Industry leading SAP integration 

Our Print Management System comes with a ready-to-use ABAP package that enables print previews of the template with master data, meaning fewer errors and avoiding costly reprints. All of this happens within the SAP system’s user interface without spending months writing code for such a tight integration.  Our ABAP package can be transported into a SAP system within seconds, and you get a streamlined SAP printing process in a matter of hours. Our integration system also includes pre-built triggers and filters for the Loftware ABAP package for rapid deployment.

The integration system includes an intuitive graphical integration builder that lets you build simple or complex integrations. It lets your IT team rapidly configure connectors (triggers), data extraction and transformation (filters) and business rules and workflows (actions) without any coding. You can also use the integration builder to enhance pre-built integrations.

Triggers that accept data from any business application or hardware device

The integrations system is an event-based application that extracts and transforms data (filters), and executes business rules and workflows (actions) based on triggers. It supports modern and legacy triggers including web services, HTTP, TCP/IP, database, serial port and file drop. Triggers allow you to connect to modern and legacy business applications, Android or iOS devices, PLCs and many other software and hardware devices.

Filters that integrate with all modern and legacy data formats

Our integration system’s filters extract and transforms data in any format so you don't have to customize your existing business applications. Our data mapping tool helps you easily extract and map data from common formats like XML, CSV or fixed-width text files. The mapping tool also supports legacy system modernization by supporting data in unstructured formats such as legacy reports or even binary printer commands.

Actions for building business rules and workflows

Our integration system includes a engine that allows print requests to be dynamically changed based on business logic that is applied to inbound dynamic data. The business rules engine selects the applicable workflow to run and execute a task, i.e. requesting data from additional data sources, selecting one or more label templates or targeting specific printers. Everything happens within our system, so there's no need to customize your existing business applications.

The integration system’s print server was built from the ground up for the modern 64-bit multi-core architecture to provide the fastest, most reliable and efficient printing capability.

It is a 100% native 64-bit application that eliminates the need for additional technology layers required by the previous generation of 32-bit applications.

Our integration system print server takes advantage of modern technologies to maximize performance and scaling needs by consuming minimal hardware resources.

71 print requests per second

One of our retail customers printed 1 million labels on Black Friday in 3 hours and 55 minutes. On average, 71 print requests where handled per second. That’s 4,255 per minute or 255,300 per hour. In an operation of this scale, performance and reliability are critical. Any downtime would have cost our customer 100s of millions on this day.

Scalability you can't outgrow

Scalability and reliability are built into the next generation architecture of our integration system. It also provides failover and high availability options required for business-critical operation. Our integration system also supports load balancing to optimize performance in high-volume environments. Some of our customers drive thousands of printers from a single centralized server.

Download the free day 30 trial and see how easy it is to build your integrated printing solutions.