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Produce packer easily integrates printers with ERP

Tomato and cucumber packer EuroFresh Farms uses cost-efficient, seamless software solution to link its 30 bar-code printers to a new enterprise resource planning system.

Once produce is packed, variable information on the lot is sent from the ERP system to the printer, where it merges with static label data and is printed for manual application.
Once produce is packed, variable information on the lot is sent from the ERP system to the printer, where it merges with static label data and is printed for manual application.

For Arizona-based EuroFresh Farms, a packer of greenhouse-grown tomatoes and cucumbers, implementing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for its technology-driven company was an enormous, one-year undertaking. The simplest and most seamless part of the project, however, was the integration of its 30 existing bar-code label printers into the new system.

Two years before adding the ERP system, EuroFresh had updated its Zebra Technologies-brand printers to the latest technology, the ZM400™, for case and pallet bar-code labeling of the 3.5 million pounds per week of produce shipped from its facilities, in Willcox and Snowflake, AZ.

Says Kevin Jensen, EuroFresh director of Information Technology, “We wanted to, if possible, take advantage of the investment we had already made in our Zebra printers. That’s where the ZebraLink™ Enterprise Connector [ZEC] came into play.”

Through the ZEC software, EuroFresh was able to link its printers with the ERP system, in a process that took just two days. “We worked with their support desk, and it took about two days to get everything configured and up and running,” confirms Jensen. “Other than minor learning curves in the first couple of months, we pretty much have had zero issues with the system.”

Technology-driven
EuroFresh Farms, founded in 1990, operates 318 acres of greenhouse facilities that produce tomatoes on the vine, as well as English and mini cucumbers for distribution across supermarket and club-store channels in the 48 contiguous states. Since its founding, EuroFresh has relied on technology to help create and deliver its high-quality, certified pesticide-free produce. The company utilizes computerized climate control systems within its greenhouses that take the guesswork out of critical growing parameters, such as temperature, humidity, light, irrigation, ventilation, and carbon dioxide levels.

Two years ago, EuroFresh began the process of implementing Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne ERP system. Says Jensen, “We chose the JD Edwards system because we felt it addressed the needs of a produce grower better than the other ones we had looked at.” He adds that one of the benefits of the ERP system for EuroFresh is that it allows greater visibility into what is transpiring in the business and identifies pain points and critical points that need to be updated or evaluated and improved upon.

As part of the ERP implementation, EuroFresh needed to connect the Windows-based Oracle application to its printers, so that the variable bar-code data supplied by the Oracle system could be “translated” for the Zebra printers. However, EuroFresh did not want to have to invest in the costly middleware traditionally used to convert the XML-based data, so it opted for the ZEC software solution.

As Marty Johnson, product marketing manager at Zebra, explains, “Typically, if they hadn’t used our ZEC solution, they would have needed to have something sit between our printers and the Oracle application to translate the information being sent from Oracle to our printers. So there would have been a need for middleware hardware to drive that conversion of information coming from Oracle to our printers.

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New e-book on Multipacking and Case Packing