Three Questions Label Converters Are Asking About Job Tracking, Performance, and the Cloud
A common story I hear when I visit Label Converters is that customer service representatives have to answer the question from their customer, “What is the status of my order?” If it is in process, often the only reliable way to answer the question is to go out to the floor and to find out how far along it is, sometimes by finding and counting in-process rolls.
A common second question comes from a general manager or an owner in the middle of the month. It is some version of “how are we actually doing?” Not the answer that comes after the close, today when there is time to affect the results. The answer usually requires that an analyst export data from the ERP and build a spreadsheet that is stale the moment it is presented.
The third one comes from the IT manager, and it is not a question so much as a look. It arrives when I mention an upgrade. It means: I lose a weekend to this, and if it goes badly I own that too. If you talk to him a while longer, you find out the upgrade is the least of it. He also owns the backups, and whether they would actually restore, and keeping people out of the network. The question is when is this going to get easier.
Three questions. And the related question of how we can reduce the cost, the pain of getting the answers. I have heard them in Ohio, Wisconsin, Ontario and Texas. They come from different people in different roles, and for a long time our honest answer to all three was some version of “not yet.” That changes now.
The floor walk
Start with that first question — where the job is.
Every converter I know has a version of the floor walk. Somebody needs to know where a job is, so somebody physically goes and looks. In a small shop that is a reasonable system. In a plant running short runs across multiple presses with slitting downstream, it stops being reasonable and nobody notices, because the floor walk is invisible. It does not show up on a report. It shows up as a CSR who cannot answer a customer until somebody gets back from the floor, several times a day.
What made this hard to fix is that WIP rolls are genuinely complicated. A raw roll comes in and Label Traxx has always known about it — that part is easy. Then it gets printed, and slit into lanes, and some of those lanes get rewound, and now you have children of a parent that itself came from a parent, each with its own length and width and number across, each sitting somewhere specific, each carrying a share of the cost. Generic tracking systems tend not to model that, because generic tracking systems were not built by people who know what a lane is.
So we built it. Track & Trace extends the roll control Label Traxx already has out onto the floor. Ticket progress. WIP roll detail and history. Where the roll is, what it came from, how many lineal feet came off it, which press, which operator, which lane.
The CSR stops walking. That is the boring part of the value, and it is the part that pays for itself.
The 2 a.m. version
Here is the part that is not boring.
A brand owner calls. There is a problem with a label — adhesive, registration, a substrate defect, it does not matter which. Their question is never “what happened.” Their question is “what else did you ship us?”
If you cannot answer that quickly, you have two options. You can guess narrow, and risk missing affected material. Or you can guess wide and quarantine a great deal of good product to be safe. Most people guess wide, because the first option is unthinkable. Guessing wide is expensive and it is also, quietly, an admission that you do not know.
Tracing is the answer to that question. Trace the defect back to the source of the quality problem: the piece of equipment, work in process roll or master roll. Then trace forward — every roll that generated from it, every order those rolls went into, every carton, every pallet, every shipment. Serialized cartons tied to a manifest mean you are naming specific boxes, not describing a date range.
Some plants manage this process on paper as a requirement of customers in regulated industries. The process is awkward and unreliable. It can take hours to track a finished roll back to the work in process roll that may have been the cause and then identify the finished rolls that may be affected by the same problem. Even then, the relationship is not certain. That is the problem this module exists to eliminate.
Tracking tells you where it is. Tracing tells you what it touched. The second one is the reason you buy it.
The best analyst in the building
Now the second question. How are we actually doing.
Every converter has the data. It is in Label Traxx. The problem has never been the data, it has been the distance between the data and a person who wants to look at it. That distance is usually measured in ODBC connections, manual exports, and one person’s institutional knowledge of which query to run.
AVA closes that distance. Amtech Visual Analytics is not a new product for us — it is a proven one, now connected to the Label Traxx data warehouse and shipping with dashboards already built for financial and operational performance. You open it, you see the business, and when a number looks wrong you click into it instead of asking somebody to pull it.
I want to be precise about the alternative, because I respect it. Your IT team could build this in Power BI. Genuinely, they could. What they would do first is model your data warehouse, and then build every dashboard, and then maintain both. That is not a weekend. AVA ships that work done, and we add dashboards every quarter.
And I want to say something about the spreadsheets, because software people are often rude about them. The spreadsheets in your building are not a failure. They are what a smart person built because the system would not answer them. Keep the pivot tables. What we are trying to end is the full-time job of feeding them.
The look from the IT manager
Which brings me to the server.
Label Traxx now runs as a web application that we host. Same functions, same menus, same screens, same tabs, same fields. Your team does not retrain, because there is nothing new to learn. Data and workflows migrate through automatic routines — we run the move, you do not staff a project. For an existing customer that is the whole point: the pathway onto the new platform is designed to cost you a fraction of the time and effort a platform change normally does.
But I want to spend a moment on the part of this that has nothing to do with convenience.
When your ERP lives on a machine in your building, you own things you never asked to own. You own whether the backups ran. You own whether they would actually restore, which is a different question and a harder one to answer with confidence. You own patching. And you own keeping criminals out of the system that holds your orders, your costs, and your customers.
I am not going to tell you that you are doing any of that badly. Most of the shops I visit are doing it about as well as anyone could while also making labels for a living. That is the actual problem. Backup and disaster recovery is a specialty. Cyber defense is a specialty. Neither of them is your specialty, and neither of them should have to be.
On the cloud platform, backup, fail-over, and cyber defense are built in. That is not a feature we are asking you to admire. It is a category of risk moving off your plate and onto ours, which is where it belongs, because we can afford to be specialists at it and a converter shouldn’t have to be.
The IT manager’s look, when I explain this part, changes.
I want to be careful here, because I have sat in enough rooms to know what “we’re moving to the cloud” often means in ERP. It means a new system, a re-implementation, and a long stretch of your life. That is not this. It is Label Traxx, preserved, with the infrastructure taken off your plate.
We are delivering it in phases, on a published schedule, and I would rather give you the schedule than a promise: Estimation in November 2026, Order Processing in March 2027, Stock Products and Job Costing in June 2027, Accounting and JDF in July 2027, Siteline and the Cloud API in September 2027.
There is no forced timeline. Nobody is being moved on our schedule. When you are ready, we run the migration with you.
What I would ask you to do
If you are at LOUPE in Chicago this week, come and be difficult with us. Bring a job you think will break the estimator. Bring the recall scenario that keeps your quality manager up. Ask the AVA dashboard a question it was not built to answer and watch us drill into it. That is a far better use of the floor than a slide deck, and honestly it is more useful to us than it is to you.
If you are not coming, the people who own these products are reachable, and I would rather have the awkward conversation now than after you have bought something.
Grant Emison
Head of Labels Products
