Most companies with supply chains are far from where they could be to deal with large-scale (and often unplanned) disruptions. Human error or natural disasters not only impact products going into market, but getting food on tables and medicine for those who need it.
While businesses and disasters vary widely in scope and complexity, this blog will outline things to consider as you’re creating or updating business continuity plans to ensure key business needs that require labeling are being met when faced with disruptive events.
Brother Mobile Solutions is partnering with TEKLYNX, a global leader in barcode label software solutions, to bring enterprises some of today’s most advanced tools to design and print industry-compliant barcode labels quickly and easily.
Business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR), helps to mitigate the negative effects of a significant disastrous event to keep a business operational through the disruption. At a high level, disaster recovery is focused on tools and procedures to enable the recovery or continuation of vital technology infrastructure, while business continuity is focused on the plan and actions to take during a disaster to maintain operations.
Emergency events include natural disasters, a business crisis, pandemic, workplace violence, or any event that results in a disruption that may stop or significantly impact successful business operations.
When manufacturers are running outdated of inefficient labeling processes, recovering from disaster has its challenges. Some of the most common disruptions we see are primary servers going down, planned or unplanned system maintenance, and computer crashes.
You can lean on your technology partners and experts, like TEKLYNX, when disruptions occur. Having the right team in place for your labeling environment, with experience in recovering label management systems or consulting with you on disaster recovery for your organization’s labeling environment, is essential to maintain business operations when the unexpected happens.
We have also implemented our solutions in high availability (HA) manufacturing environments. HA environments or systems are well-tested and dependable enough to operate continuously to avoid failure. To reduce interruptions and downtime, it is essential to be ready for unexpected events that can bring down servers.
Dot Foods is the largest food industry redistributor in North America and has been helping companies move food products more efficiently and cost-effectively from the manufacturer to distributor since 1960. Headquartered in Mount Sterling, Illinois, Dot Foods helps 1,100 food manufacturers within their 14 distribution centers across North America.
Dot Foods collaborated with the TEKLYNX Enterprise Team to determine that CODESOFT and SENTINEL would be the right fit for Dot Foods. This solution would help Dot Foods meet their internal labeling security requirements to maintain a HA environment, have the ability to automate printing to their large volume of printers, and included TEKLYNX world-class technical and customer support before, during, and after implementation.
With their newly implemented SENTINEL automated label printing solution, Dot Foods was able to maintain their HA environment and gain reliability with their new labeling software in all 14 distribution centers across North America. Read the full case study.
Business continuity refers to the way a business maintains operations during a time of technological malfunction or outage. In our case, disaster recovery for labeling refers to the way labeling software applications are restored following a damaging event.
As a first step, inventory what you have and where you have it installed – locally, nationally, or globally – and document your licensing information. Know the serial numbers, versions, the workstations or networks it’s installed on, servers, authorized users, and system integrations. If you know the what, where, and who, you’ll have a better understanding of how a disaster will impact workflows to be able to recover quickly.
Using one or more of these strategies can help prepare your labeling system for unexpected issues.
Brother offers a range of commercial and industrial thermal barcode label printers, such as the Titan Industrial Printer Series that are compatible with TEKLYNX software solutions for manufacturing, warehouse and other parts of the supply chain.
Learn how the combination of Brother printers and TEKLYNX software offer businesses the tools needed to print labels quickly and efficiently.
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