In 2023, Label Traxx celebrated its 30th year in business. A company whose roots reach back literally to the production floor of a label converter before Macs, networking, or the internet. Ken Meinhardt, founder of Label Traxx, worked on the production floor of that label converter and identified opportunities to introduce automation. As the software solution grew, Ken and his business partner Dave Porter split off to launch their budding software careers.
The roots of a software solution tell you a lot about what the solution values. Ken was an employee on the production floor. The focus of Label Traxx over the last 30 years has been primarily about one thing – the employees who are using the software. Ken stands by his original focus – how can printers improve the experience of their employees by streamlining tasks using software?
Today, Label Traxx has ~500 label and flexible packaging printers worldwide and over 10,000 daily users of the software. The label converting business has changed a lot in the last 30 years. The Label Traxx focus for much of the last three decades has been on the small, independent label converter who’s dominated the industry. And Label Traxx continues to focus on serving that community. Today, the industry is experiencing a significant consolidation as investors enter to roll up multiple, independent producers. As a result, the Label Traxx community of printers is now a mix of independent operations and multi-location enterprises.
Over the last two years, Label Traxx has made a huge investment in modernizing the product and extending its value to support both the independent producer and the enterprise, multi-plant organizations. Our focus remains on continuing to be the Print MIS/ERP that employees can use, prefer to use, and adopt without resistance. With Label Traxx v9, REST API, Data Warehouse, and Label Traxx Enterprise, we are extending that focus to meet the requirements of an integrated ecosystem, providing multi-site support, and greatly improving the accessibility of data stored in Label Traxx.
The MIS/ERP Runs the Business; the Employees Run the System
We believe that the employee user experience is still the vital component to enabling the Print MIS/ERP to run the business and the employees to run the system. When Print MIS/ERP systems are difficult to use or make little sense to the employees who are the daily end users, adoption is low and workarounds are high.
- With Label Traxx v9, we doubled down on improving the user experience.
- With the REST API we are opening Label Traxx to be better at working and playing well with your entire technology stack.
- With Data Warehousing, we liberate your data, so you are limited only by your ingenuity as to what and how you want to report on, analyze, and visualize using your business’ data.
Label Traxx Enterprise takes the foundation of Label Traxx’s 30 years of understanding the label converting business and extends that value to an organization that manufactures across physical locations.
The manufacturing plan for labels and flexible packaging is embedded in the estimate and the customer product records in Label Traxx. These recipes involve raw materials, artwork, tools, and equipment. Managing these “recipes” across multiple manufacturing plants means we must carefully manage the required assets and then track when and where those assets might need to move between manufacturing locations. The goal is optimized production that takes into consideration the physical locations of the assets required, the shipping destination of the customer, and the desired due date. When you combine Label Traxx Enterprise with Batched Automated Scheduling, you give your employees a toolset that allows them to optimize within individual plants and across multiple plants.
If you're interested in discussing whether Label Traxx Enterprise is the right solution for your label converting business, contact our sales team.
