Loftware ：How Does Your Enterprise Labeling Stack Up?

How Does Your Enterprise Labeling Stack Up?

5 Stages of Labeling - Find Out Where You Fit

In order to build a roadmap towards labeling excellence you must first understand the stages of labeling maturity. Fortunately, the Maturity Model for Enterprise Labeling offers just that - a framework for improvement in the area of labeling throughout your organization.

Now you can use this model to create a baseline and define a clear path toward Enterprise Labeling excellence.

This report shows you how to:

• Evaluate current effectiveness of your labeling capabilities
• Determine key steps required to achieve higher levels of competency
• Collaborate with internal teams regarding next steps for your labeling
• Develop a blueprint to help your organization prioritize labeling investments

ENTERPRISE LABELING MATURITY MODEL

A Framework for Labeling Excellence

Introduction

The Maturity Model for Enterprise Labeling provides a framework for improvement in the area of labeling throughout your organization. It highlights your capabilities and processes over five specific stages of maturity, offering a roadmap for improvement and providing a clear picture of the areas which need to be addressed for continuous progress. Your organization can assess technologies and existing methods through this diagnostic tool, which allows you to measure current effectiveness of your labeling and determine what capabilities are needed to increase labeling efficiencies and enable business transformation.

This model has been developed as a result of working with companies in the labeling space for more than 30 years to identify the most critical areas of development and growth when it comes to supply chain labeling. That work, with thousands of leading global companies from across a wide range of key industries, includes decades of research, extensive surveys and feedback from domain experts. This has led to the creation of the Five Stage Maturity Model for Enterprise Labeling. Now, supply chain, logistics and business stakeholders can use this model to create a baseline and define a clear path toward Enterprise Labeling excellence.

In order to build a clear roadmap towards Enterprise Labeling maturity, this model includes five separate maturity levels, based upon key criteria referred to as ‘dimensions.’ Once you measure how well you’re managing labeling within key dimensions, you can chart a course for your optimal labeling end state. With this assessment, you can identify any potential roadblocks, operational gaps or other areas of concern so you can prioritize accordingly. Working with the Enterprise Labeling Maturity Model will give you a:

• Mechanism to evaluate the current effectiveness of your labeling capabilities
• Guide for the key steps required to progress through each stage to higher levels of competency in labeling and supply chain optimization
• Vehicle for collaborating with internal teams regarding optimization and next steps for labeling
• Blueprint to help support investment and budgetary support for labeling

The Five Stages of Enterprise Labeling Maturity

Not all businesses have the same labeling demands or progress at the same pace across the Enterprise Labeling continuum. Additionally, not all companies have the same global requirements, need to scale labeling or increase capabilities to support evolving business demands. However, all businesses need to ensure that their labeling requirements are optimized for business and supply chain efficiency as well as future growth.

And the first step is to understand your level of labeling maturity and chart a course for the highest level that

makes sense for your business. Below is a brief description of each maturity level.

Companies at this stage tend to have manually driven processes and largely siloed initiatives which cause them to be reactionary in meeting their labeling demands. Generally, each location has autonomy over its own labeling, resulting in a variety of different solutions for labeling used across an organization. Having this control enables them to be agile and responsive, albeit only at the local level. At this stage there is no integration or reliance on data exports from enterprise applications resulting in lack of accuracy and consistency. This approach involves more time and people to execute labeling

Stage 2 - Proactively Manage and Plan

In stage 2, companies are working toward standardizing their labeling on one solution and are beginning to add some level of automation. Although the labeling function is being managed more proactively, it is still highly localized with silo deployments and individual facilities maintaining control. Labeling at this level takes more time and energy and maintenance to execute due to a lack of automation and standardization. Variable and dynamic content remain a challenge.

Stage 3 - Consolidate and Integrate

At stage 3 the labeling function becomes integrated with data sources for increased accuracy and consistency. Centralization becomes more of a focus while business logic begins to play an increasing role while more variable content is used. The move to automate and integrate offers great benefits and increases efficiencies in labeling overall, offering a path to more optimized labeling company-wide. However, executive level awareness of labeling and its importance is limited as is overall labeling visibility.

Stage 4 - Orchestrate Across the Organization

At stage 4, labeling goes beyond integration and is standardized and centralized across the organization, with fully automated workflows and data-driven labeling capabilities orchestrated throughout. Executive awareness of labeling increases along with increased visibility through business intelligence. This stage brings increased efficiencies across the enterprise and facilitates global scaling. Companies at this stage begin integrating and sharing content, processes, and workflows between Enterprise Labeling and Artwork Management.

Stage 5 - Optimize and Extend Beyond the Organization

At this final stage, companies begin extending their labeling and labeling processes beyond their organi- zation. Labeling is highly automated and integrated to ensure accuracy and consistency while optimizing efficiency and resource costs. This stage, which includes both internal and external stakeholders, highlights the importance of labeling to the overall supply chain and enables companies to use labeling as a competitive advantage. Companies use a digital platform to create, manage and print complex labeling and artwork globally, including suppliers and partners.

The Dimensions of Enterprise Labeling Maturity

Organizations can succeed in creating fully optimized labeling as part of their supply chain strategy by advancing maturity in each of the following nine dimensions outlined below. When considering the nine dimensions included in the Enterprise Maturity Model, three distinct categories emerge as logical groupings for these areas of labeling maturity. They include Foundational, Operational and Governance as explained in detail below.

Figure 2. Categories of Enterprise Labeling Maturity

FOUNDATIONAL DIMENSIONS

The first category examines the Foundational capabilities involved in implementing an optimized approach to Enterprise Labeling. These core capabilities, including standardization and centralization, create the blueprint for how your labeling should be deployed and accessed enterprise-wide. Dimensions in the Foundational category help define the scope of labeling across your organization as well as architecture - showcasing

the necessity of collaboration between packaging and labeling along the product lifecycle, from product development all the way through the supply chain to the end user.

Standardization

Deploying a single labeling solution across your business enables labeling consistency and dramatically improves oversight. Rather than managing multiple systems, a standardized approach enables companies to support enterprise-wide labeling changes while streamlining maintenance. In addition to reducing cost and improving efficiency, having a single, scalable solution for labeling facilitates expansion to new global locations. Also, by taking a standardized approach, companies can ensure that a common set of labels, content, applications and data sources are used across the supply chain.

Centralization

Centralizing labeling across multiple locations and geographies ensures label consistency across your supply chain. A centralized labeling model provides access to labeling at a primary location, supports adherence to corporate standards and enables rapid and universal label changes throughout your organization. This type of centralized approach, which offers failover to individual locations with continuous uptime, is also essential in supporting business continuity in the face of any potential supply chain disruption.

End-to-End Labeling

This dimension addresses the combined needs for labeling and packaging across the entire product lifecycle.

Stakeholders involved in both supply chain labeling and product packaging frequently use much of the same content, images, warnings, translations and phrases for both purposes. Optimizing this dimension requires you to have the most up to date content for both, which is why it is important to have a common

approach to review and approve any data and images. Ultimately, an end-to-end approach offers new levels of control, visibility and efficiency for managing labels and packaging artwork, enabling companies to eliminate bottlenecks, reduce time to market and ensure compliance.

Figure 3.  Foundational Dimensions

OPERATIONAL DIMENSIONS

This Operational category of the Enterprise Labeling Maturity Model focuses on the physical execution of labeling within an organization. It highlights how labeling actually works and interoperates within your broader ecosystem measuring how well your labeling solution works with existing business systems, databases and applications, including devices used for printing and output. Here the model examines how labeling content is accessed and delivered through automation and integration with key data sources, and ultimately how it culminates with printing and output of your labels.

Automation

Replacing manual processes with automated processes driven by digital solutions offers new levels of control and consistency over labeling. Automation of labeling can be achieved by supporting transactional initiated labeling, along with configurable business logic which is essential in supporting variations and volume. Empowering business users to create and update labels without relying on IT services and leveraging automated approval workflows enables proactive label management, eliminates bottlenecks, and ensures consistency and compliance.

Integration

Integrating labeling with existing business applications offers a range of strategic advantages. Labeling that leverages existing business processes and vital data sources supports greater levels of label accuracy and consistency, while eliminating duplicate data and the need to retrain users. Initiating labeling transactions from enterprise applications and using data from a source of truth supports labeling complexity while vastly reducing the number of label templates. Integration is vital in ensuring accuracy, improving customer response times, and meeting regulatory requirements.

Printing & Output

The ability to output labels and documents across a diverse set of print devices in the time required to meet shipping and production requirements is vital. Independent of print make or model, supporting the rigors

of global label printing requires that you optimize speed and network efficiency to print labels quickly and efficiently. Native print drivers, designed for specific printers and printer languages, allow for optimum print performance at both headquarters and remote locations. As digital technologies evolve and as the need for more label data spikes, companies are using e-labeling as a means to improve customer experience, meet requirements and reduce the cost of printed labels and documents.

Figure 4.  Operational Dimensions

GOVERNANCE DIMENSIONS

The final category of the Enterprise Labeling Maturity Model is Governance, which involves oversight, management, and control of labeling. Governance measures the ability to create new efficiencies and drive process improvements throughout an organization which can impact the bottom line. It also includes compliance with customer and regulatory requirements while offering expanded visibility into labeling processes. Governance also spotlights the role that ownership and key stakeholders play in labeling as part of an overall supply chain strategy.

Compliance

This dimension covers evolving customer demands, industry standards and regulations that define how your products are developed, marketed, shipped and disposed. Labeling requirements are more demanding than ever and organizations must make sure their labeling can keep up. Compliance examines the ability to

manage complex, variable data and label formats to meet current regulatory, regional and customer demands. Ensuring compliance with formatting requirements, barcodes, logos, languages, warnings and product information allows companies to avoid hefty fines and business disruption while supporting the ability to enter new markets.

Visibility & Oversight

Core to governance is having visibility into areas where labeling is both working as planned as well as areas where problems exist and change is required. Employing advanced analytics and real-time reporting to offer visibility into label creation, use and output provides a platform for auditing, assessment and continuous improvement. With access to advanced analytics and real-time reporting, users are able to gain visibility into constantly changing yet vital information including labels, printers, print jobs, users and audit data. These insights drive improvements to labeling processes as well as driving future supply chain and

labeling investments.

Ownership

As companies extend their global operations, labeling has become more prominent involving multiple departments and stakeholders and requiring new levels of attention. This includes an expanded focus by executives who view labeling as a strategic differentiator. This differentiation is driven by the positive bottom line results that can be achieved by reducing maintenance costs, avoiding fines due to non-compliance and

preventing supply chain disruption.

Figure 5.  Governance Dimensions