TIGER Coatings is not only giving its labeling process a new coat of paint, but is rethinking the entire process: fully automated, multicolored, multilingual and with versioned data and label templates. This results in significant cost savings, greater flexibility and complete traceability of all labeling activities.
Founded in 1930 from a paint shop, TIGER Coatings is now an internationally active family business with 8 production sites worldwide, 3 research & development centers and a sales network in around 50 countries. The high-quality coating solutions from TIGER – TIGER Drylac® powder coating and TIGITAL® Inks & Tattoo for industrial, digital printing systems – emphasize the value of facades, car rims, furniture, household, sports and leisure equipment or machines and protect their surfaces against UV radiation, corrosion, chemical or mechanical effects. With TIGITAL® 3D-Set, TIGER continues to drive innovation and launches completely new thermoset materials for SLS 3D printing.
Industry: Chemical
Applied OPAL products
System Environment
Label Designer
- Full-surface color printing with labeling of hazardous substances and product properties
- Connection of an external GHS/CRP system (ChemGes)
- Versioned labels in SAP
- Accurate and valid hazardous substances in several languages
- Dynamic templates for multiple products
- Centralized processes and data in SAP
- Traceability at container level
- Reduction of operational labeling costs
The color makes the difference
Implementing multicolor printing on labels at a color manufacturer is particularly challenging because the color of the product must match the printed color exactly. Printer and surface are additional parameters that influence the result.
To meet these requirements, TIGER prints its labels on professional color label printers from the manufacturer “AFINA LABEL”, standardized label material and the colour mix for each product is stored in OPAL’s label management system.
The layout, created with the BarTender design software from Seagull Scientific, allows the color control of objects via external data sources. This example shows very clearly how important the coordination between hardware and software is in order to achieve a satisfactory result.
GHS/CPR labeling
As TIGER already uses color printers for product labeling, the question of how the colored hazard symbols are applied to the label is superfluous. These are printed just as dynamically as product attributes and color codes. The challenges of GHS/CPR labeling were as follows:
- Interface to GHS/CPR data from an external system
- Versioning of labels with different GHS/CPR data
- Up to ten different languages on the label, depending on the target region
- Different sizes of hazard symbols, depending on the label size
The GHS/CPR data and the associated hazard and safety information in various languages are managed at TIGER in the external “ChemGes” system. To ensure that the data from ChemGes is always up-to-date, the system checks whether new/updated data is available for a product container when the process order is released. If this is the case, a new version of the labels is automatically created for each region and label type in the Content & Alert Manager.
Traceability
Traceability is an important reason for labeling products. In industries such as chemicals, to which TIGER also belongs, the GHS/CPR data is relevant for conformity. Violations of conformity are a high risk, which is why transparent traceability is sought in labeling. This means that any changes to the layout or the printed data can be traced and reprinted.
An add-on to OPAL’s Label Management called CAM (Content & Alert Manager) ensures that every change to the label layout or the data on the label receives a new content version. Variable data such as a batch number or date/time specification can be excluded from the check. This means that a new version is only created for relevant data such as product data, hazard and safety information. By versioning the layout and data, TIGER has achieved complete traceability in the labeling process.
Another challenge was to ensure the traceability of the individual containers (handling units) in SAP. Each container is therefore marked with a unique ID. In addition, every print is logged in SAP on the handling unit, including reprints – if necessary. In this way, TIGER ensures that every container in a production batch is traceable and can be assigned to the time of filling.
To the point
The PoP (Point of Print) determines how well the work has been done and what kind of printing experience the user is left with. TIGER has succeeded in transforming the extraction of data from different systems into an automated process. Many decisions are taken away from the user and result in an outstanding printing experience.
The different variants for the marking process that are created with our customers are as large as the range of colors that TIGER offers. The requirements for multi-color printing presented us with a special challenge, and we found an elegant solution with the TIGER team.
Good luck with the rollout of the other locations!
Rony Sieber, Team Leader Professional Service at OPAL
The OPAL Label solution has significantly increased our flexibility for customizing the design of labels. We can now quickly implement customer requirements in SAP without major development effort.
Johannes Mayr
SAP Consultant
TIGER Coatings
IT project manager
