Pallet Mark — pallet labelling on the production floor

Every pallet of water has to be labelled: product name, production date, batch number, bottle count, packaging, gross weight. At the plant the shift supervisor filled in a paper sheet by hand and tucked it inside the pallet.

The weak points of that approach:

• one wrong digit written by hand and the batch ships with incorrect data;
• the sheet gets lost or soaked in transit, and reading it means taking the pallet apart;
• different supervisors' handwriting reads differently, and there is nothing to reconcile against after the fact.

And most importantly: when a complaint came in, there was no way to establish who had released the pallet — on which line, on which shift.

• Handwriting errors are gone — the data is entered once into a structured form.
• The label does not get lost or damaged: it is stuck on the outside, so a pallet can be identified without taking it apart.
• The barcode reveals the line, the shift, the supervisor and the production period — complaints are resolved in minutes.
• Labelling became a few keystrokes, and the history of printed labels is stored and available.

The smallest project on this list — and an instructive one: sometimes, to remove an entire class of production errors, all it takes is one application on the shop floor and a label printer next to it.