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General packaging materials, equipment and services
News Release from: Advanced Labelling Systems | Subject: CHESS thermal-transfer printer
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 26 February 2002
All weather printing does not fade in UV
light
A warehouse needed an all-weather printer that could be fully incorporated into its quality control system - it found one.
When Brett Martin needed a new pallet label printer for its recently-opened warehouse, it approached Advanced Labelling Systems (ALS) - the labelling experts The company needed an all-weather printer that could be fully incorporated into its quality control system
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 15 May 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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The extruded plastics manufacturer was not disappointed with ALS's CHESS thermal-transfer printer.
Employing around 400 workers, Brett Martin's headquarters in Mallusk, Northern Ireland, is one of five company sites certified to BS EN ISO 9002.
Made up of a number of discrete factories, each housing between two and 18 production lines, the site manufactures a range of specialist extruded and moulded plastic products for UK and international distributors.
Further reading
Pallet printers are stand-alone or integratable
Advanced Labelling Systems Ltd (ALS) has launched the ALS-PL-Series, a new range of cost effective and highly reliable pallet labellers which use thermal direct or transfer print technology.
Labelling products at high speed
ALS produces a high speed, rotary labelling machine, the ALS-R-Series, which produces high quality results in the application of front/back, neck position, multi-panel and wraparound labels.
Labelling squeezable tubes cost-effectively
Advanced Labelling Systems' ALS-T-Series tube labelling system is designed to provide cost effective, accurate, high quality tube dressing for aluminium and plastics squeezable tubes.
Roger O'Dowd, Information Systems Manager, explains that reliability is extremely important, especially in relation to the printing of the company's copy-only pallet labels.
"We work on a 24-hour production basis, so broken printers would mean bringing in IT technicians and staff out of hours to produce the labels." Although the labels are applied manually, Roger believes any printer downtime would have "an aesthetic impact and could result in errors such as mislabelling of pallets".
Brett Martin manufactures products for distribution specialists in three broad sectors: roofing products, such as rooflights; building products, including waste displacement, guttering and down pipes; and semi-finished items used extensively in sign, display and fabrication industries.
The company's printers produce labels for a range of pallet sizes ranging from standard pallets up to 13m-long varieties.
To cope with demand, Roger says the company acquired seven Tiger XXL printers from ALS, the first of which arrived in 2000.
Prior to this, Brett Martin employed OKI dot matrix printers to tackle all-weather label production.
The matrix printers' reliance on ribbon technology and paper labels, Roger explains, meant that label text would often fade in UV light.
The OKI printers also only provided limited printing quality and were unable to print in large enough font sizes to be visible when pallets were stacked high.
The Tiger XXL printers, on the other hand, benefit from thermal-transfer printing which is better suited to outdoor environments, and are also able to print on plastic labels.
Yet, when Roger looked into acquiring an additional printer for Brett Martin's new warehouse, he learnt that the Tiger XXL had been superseded by the CHESS range of printers, which combine 64-bit processing power with a multi-tasking operating system and 150 MIPS (million instructions per second) transfer speeds.
As he was more than happy with the Tiger XXL printers, Roger says he was keen to try out the CHESS printer when it arrived in August 2001.
"The first thing I noticed," Roger recalls "was the speed.
It seemed to be a lot faster." He says the new ALS CHESS printer produced the company's A4 labels much quicker than any of the previous printers.
In fact, the new processing power of the CHESS printer means that it can build images 20 times faster than conventional printers and achieve print speeds of up to 300mm/sec.
Yet, speed isn't Roger's main concern - he's more interested in quality.
He says: "Clarity is very important and the ALS CHESS printer provides excellent print quality." Another key consideration, Roger explains, was the ability of the new printer to link into Brett Martin's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software that, he says, is "the linchpin of the business".
The system provides the company with all its quality control, production management and business reporting requirements and, as such, is used to monitor all business activities.
It was therefore critical that the new printer linked successfully into this system as re-inputting data for pallet labels would devastate production timescales and could lead to re-keying errors.
Utilising its Parallel Centronics and serial RS232/RS485 interfaces for network connection, the ALS CHESS printer slotted into the ERP system with ease.
Roger says: "There were no hiccups - it fitted in well." The near-edge, thermal-print head technology employed in the ALS CHESS range also meant the new printer continued the all-weather capabilities established by the Tiger XXLs.
Incorporating 17 standard and two vector fonts - all fully rotatable - the CHESS printer at Brett Martin also offers a extensive feature list which includes popular bar code styles such as 2D Maxi Code, PDF 417, Codablock F and Data Matrix.
Brett Martin has been so pleased with the performance of the CHESS printer that it has now placed an order for an ALS 230 StepAir, blow-on label applicator for other applications at its plant.
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