Adidas runs with new printers

The manufacturer of athletic footwear and apparel began installing the new printers in March. It added 34 of them at its Spartanburg, SC, distribution center, two in Ontario, CA, and one each in Portland, OR, and Clemmons, NC.

"We print four labels in the time it had taken us to print one before," says Bill Robinson, footwear and logistics manager at Spartanburg. Designed for identification and tracking, the 9840 bar-code printers run at speeds to 8"/sec. The increased efficiency at Adidas is due not only to the faster printers, but also to an improvement in how the printers are networked to a host computer at the Spartanburg plant.

The 9840s print onto 4"x6" pressure-sensitive labels that Monarch also supplies. As before, they're printed with origin, destination, bar codes and product information for shipments to retail outlets. Each case holds anywhere from one to 10 individual shoe cartons. Labels are hand-applied to shippers. "They've provided us with a real workhorse of a printer, and we're very pleased with their performance at our facilities," Robinson summarizes.