Packaging Systems Prints High Volumes of Shipping Labels

Packaging Systems’ Need

A division of PPC, PSLLC is an innovative fulfillment house that provides packaging, display, filling, and distribution services to powerhouse clients in the food, pharmaceutical, personal care, and household products industries. PSLLC is OTC-certified, as well as FDA, DEA, DMD, and DOD-approved.

In November 2005, PSLLC faced a monumental challenge: Receive raw CDs and an address list in the thousands from a Southern California music company, validate the addresses, and put 30 CDs into each counter display, and then ship the displays to post offices nationwide. Some post offices received three displays, others two, and still others one. In all, roughly 15,000 packages had to be shipped in days via Priority Mail^®. PSLLC also needed to print two-part doc-tab labels, with one part the main shipping label and the other part containing shipment information for record-keeping. Thus, PSLLC faced a major challenge: How to ship such a large order speedily and accurately by a new method—the U.S. Postal Service^®. Fortunately for PSLLC, it learned about Endicia just in the knick of time.

Endicia’s Solution

The Endicia customer support team provided guidance critical to the success of the project. In order to process the large list of shipments in batches, PSLLC used Endicia technology to import its address list and shipment information for print-staging, namely, address verification, weight & mail class assignment, and list printing. Endicia software automatically performed address verification on the entire list to get the correct ZIP+4 (9-digit) ZIP Codes and correct other common address errors (e.g., spelling corrections, formatting, and abbreviations) for successful mail delivery. At the end of the address-verification step, addresses that were not validated were highlighted in yellow, so PSLLC could proceed by: (1) batch-printing labels to validated ship-to addresses; and (2) exporting the ship-to addresses that did not validate for client review and correction.

Endicia's mapping of variable fields to rubber-stamps placed anywhere on the shipment mapped the tracking information to show on the tab portion of PSLLC's doc-tab labels. This also allowed for the mapping of other shipping information, including postage fees, mailing date, etc.

PSLLC also used four Zebra LP 2844 printers to process the shipping labels. These printers proved ideal since they: (1) could run for hours without a hitch; (2) could print tracking information on the tab portion of doc-tab labels in a matter of seconds; and (3) being thermal, required no ink or toner and eliminated the smearing, smudging, and misfeeds associated with laser and inkjet printers.