Highgrove Helps Magna Become GS1 Compliant

Highgrove have recently implemented the new GS1 standards at Magna specialist confectioners using PrintBOS for document output design and control.

GS1 standards is designed to save money, increases sales and improves customer service by standardising and automating business processes. GS1 licenses unique numbers to identify everything from products to patients. These numbers are used to automate the flow of goods and information with bar code, RFID tags and electronic communications.

Magna are subcontract manufacturers to a number of household names.

One of their customers, Kraft,  requires that the shipping barcodes that Magna produce are industry standard. That way their automated retrieval system can automatically book finished goods into their warehouse. The industry standard that they specified is the GS1 standards body. There are numerous requirements to achieve this, one of which is for Magna to be a member of GS1 to have a UCC number allocated.

In addition to this requirement Magna have taken the opportunity to achieve the following using PrintBOS:

Book finished goods achieved by scanning the customer’s outer barcode rather than keying the Magna part number. Put simply the branded packaging has an industry standard barcode on it that is used by the retail chain, supermarkets etc. Highgrove set a database to map this to the Magna part number for booking.

Despatch goods by scanning an industry standard shipping label. Rather than still produce the internal Magna pallet label, after finished goods Highgrove has produced an industry standard label. The systems have been changed to accept an industry standard barcode and extract the Magna pallet label out of it.

Produce a GS1 or EAN barcode that contains check digits within the body of the barcode. These needed to be calculated by using PrintBOS after compiling disparate pieces of data that had been supplied separately. The formatting of the characters had to substring other pieces of data to print them in a particular way to enable ease of reading.