Whether you’re running a small-scale distribution operation for local florists or you manage a global plant export business, you’ll know that labelling is crucial to both logistics and legislation.
Whatever the scale of your operation, automated labelling makes sense, with a range of machines able to deal with the more mundane tasks that eat up your employees’ time – and offering much greater efficiency and accuracy than a human ever could.
Cobalt designs and builds print and apply labelling machines and solutions that can handle the rigours of labelling plants.
What does automated plant labelling mean?
When it comes to importing or exporting plants into or out of the UK – or indeed, transporting plants or plant matter within the UK – then you need a Plant Passport or a Phytosanitary Certificate. You can read more about what those are, what the differences and requirements for each are here but in simple terms, it is a unique, individual label that must be placed on each plant with the data stored for traceability.
Automated print and apply labelling machines can do the job quickly and efficiently, creating unique identifiers for each plant and storing the data on a dedicated server, fed from your existing systems. While offering accuracy and speed that would be impossible for any human to match, these print and apply labelling solutions ensure regulatory compliance and can solve logistical issues for warehouse management and plant distribution. With Cobalt Sentinel, validation of barcodes can also be automated, meaning that you’ll never send out an incorrect or unreadable barcode again.
Cobalt offer solutions designed to handle even the fastest packaging lines, and built-in configurations designed to deal with any of the environmental issues that come with washing plants before sending them out.
For more information about Cobalt’s Plant Passport labelling options, get in touch, or read a case study here.
Advantages of automated plant labelling
With increased speed and efficiency, employee timesaving, and improved data capture, automating plant labelling could save your business money and help you to scale up faster than you might have thought. With an exceptional return on the initial investment, automating your labelling processes can help to propel your business forward – whatever stage you’re currently at.
Free up workforce
One of the biggest advantages of automating Plant Passport labelling is freeing up your employees to deal with other tasks. Creating the unique identifying information for each plant and then storing it is a time-consuming process, and when you have to commit staff to either doing it by hand or using semi-automatic means, you’re losing productivity and missing out on potential gains elsewhere.
Speed up your operations
If the final thing holding up your packaging line is the manual or semi-automatic labelling at the end of the process, having an automatic solution could help you to increase the amount of plants that you process, package, and ultimately deliver. Increasing the speed of your labelling solution – while also improving the accuracy of the process – can offer a range of benefits, from increasing time for quality control to limiting downtime in other parts of the production line.
Scale up your operations
Along with the increased speed, being able to scale up your operation without having the bottleneck of producing the individual data for each plant by hand or with a person inputting the information into a computer system is a huge benefit of automating your plant labelling. With Cobalt machines, you can ensure the accuracy of the labels that are applied to each plant, as well as being able to speed up production of the entire line to manage more throughput.
Better data capture
When you automate the plant labelling processes, instead of dealing with recording the information by hand or inputting the data into a system, the print and apply machines can be configured to store the data in a dedicated server.
This can free up space if you had previously been storing the data physically, or save time if you had been using manual inputs into a computer system. With an automatic process to store your Plant Passport information, you can track your products much more effectively, and with much less impact on your team’s productivity.
Automate your plant labelling with Cobalt
Get in touch with the team at Cobalt to find out more about how we can help you with a range of plant labelling automation requirements.
We’re here to talk you through the options and solutions available to you when it comes to Plant Passport labelling and any other print and apply labelling solutions.
