Sara Lee Intimate Apparel is known for the beauty, style and comfort of its many designs, including those sold under the Bali, Playtex, Hanes Her Way and other noted brands. Its outdated barcode printing and validation system, however, was downright ugly and dysfunctional.

Sara Lee ships more than 36,000 cartons from its manufacturing sites daily to such well-known customers as JC Penney, Kohl’s, Macy’s, Mervyn’s, Sears and Wal-Mart. To print the cartons’ barcode labels, the company used 115 outdated printers, but of those, 40 did all of the work, while 35 were out of commission and the remaining 40 were cannibalized for parts. The printers were networked but did not offer integrated online capabilities.

The company also had no automated means for checking barcodes, and instead relied on its staff to visually validate the barcodes on each and every shipment. As a result, labels that were smudged or otherwise unreadable were sometimes missed and sent anyway. But Sara Lee’s large retail customers have strict requirements regarding the quality of the barcode labels, which they use to track shipments through the supply chain. If a label is not in compliance with a store’s standards, fees are assessed against the manufacturer’s invoice. In the case of Sara Lee, fines for low-quality barcode printing were costing the company more than $225,000 per year.

At the suggestion of Sears, Sara Lee investigated a barcode printing and validation system from Printronix. It settled on Printronix’s T5000e with Online Data Validation (ODV), a high-performance thermal printer designed to support 24/7 batch or on-demand label printing in harsh industrial settings. ODV is Printronix’s closed-loop validation system for ensuring barcode label compliance, tracking and analysis. The key to the system for Sara Lee was the ODV’s void-and-reprint technology, whereby if the ODV detects a poor-quality barcode label, it allows the system to overstrike the invalid barcode and reprint a valid one --automatically. Since the whole system runs unattended, it significantly limited operational costs as well.

During a two-month test period, Sara Lee saw a 90% drop in barcode failure, and it attributed the remaining 10% to damage during shipment, not barcode print quality. As a result, customer compliance fines during the test period totaled less than $1,000 and ODV’s online data enabled the company to dispute inaccurate customer claims. Within 90 days, the company had recouped its investment in the Printronix system.

"Our barcode failure rate has dropped to next to nothing in three short months, and we’re saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees year over year," said Brad Kennedy, manager of logistics at Sara Lee.