Workers at folding carton converter Walter G. Anderson, Inc. used to manually apply preprinted labels to the corrugated cases the company uses to ship knocked-down cartons to its customers. Walter G. Anderson's (WGA) combined labor and label costs, however, proved prohibitive for the Hamel, MN, company.
"We shipped about one million cases last year, with each case holding 250 to 300 cartons," notes Marc Anderson, vice president of manufacturing for the privately held family business. A pressure-sensitive label was manually applied to each shipping case packed on three daily shifts, five days/week. "We used a larger label size in the past, and we had to estimate the number of labels we'd need, rather than print on demand as we do now," he recalls.
