Global manufacturer of advanced plasma, laser and water jet cutting systems, Hypertherm products are used for cutting any type of metal in a variety of industries including shipbuilding, manufacturing, and automotive repair.
With nearly 50 years of experience in cutting, and maintaining 1,300 associates, the company’s client list boasts of brands including Ford, Volvo, Harley Davidson and Caterpillar.
With operations and partners worldwide, Hypertherm was experiencing significant growth, however their existing consumables product label printing system was not sufficiently accommodating this growth, and was presenting considerable risks to their operations in this lean manufacturing environment.
The company’s existing “home-grown” system was complex and customized with layers of third party applications, which posed connectivity issues for suppliers, and represented a single point of production failure.
Additional software licenses were no longer available to enable them to grow or upgrade their existing deployment, and there were inherent issues with mislabelling. Further, the system was prone to breaking, ultimately causing significant downtime issues representing a loss of productivity, with five to ten hours of troubleshooting and fixing the label system each week.
All of this resulted in customer dissatisfaction, brand integrity issues, and lost revenues, equalling $25,000 – $100,000 worth of productivity each week due to labelling issues.
After investigating alternatives, the company opted for a web-based deployment and chose Loftware Spectrum, an out-of-box, 100% browser based, enterprise labelling solution.
Utilising a 100% browser-based application designed for global deployment dramatically reduced the burden of installation and simplified support, allowing Hypertherm to manage global operations and provide new levels of reliability and support for supplier labelling. The Loftware Spectrum solution also addressed the critical connectivity issues and supported suppliers with bandwidth challenges, while addressing complex labelling requirements and streamlining maintenance.
