There a few ways in which barcoding can benefit your business. You can use barcodes at a garment level or an order level and this article will explain what the difference is between the two and how you can benefit by applying these methods.
1) Barcoding at the order level:
If you own 1, 2 or even 3 locations and you do not have a very high volume of garments coming in every day, then you can definitely benefit from barcoding at an order level. This will help you both with assigning the order to a rack location when cleaned, and also finding the order in CleanCloud when the customer walks in.
By scanning the receipt, you can set up a prompt to input the rack location and once that appears you can then scan the barcode you placed on the rack location and CleanCloud will input that information for you without any typing on your part. This allows you or your staff to quickly scan the barcode on the receipt, place the items on the rack, then scan the rack location.
If your customer walks in with their receipt you can scan that to quickly find their completed order in CleanCloud and check out their order
2) Heat Seal Barcoding at the garment level:
This is particularly useful for those who process a high volume of garments on a daily basis whether that be at their stores or plant(s). This method is useful to track the garments of your regular customers, so if you are in an area where you often get different customers then this method is likely not for you.
In terms of how this system then works, you would need to apply a heat seal barcode on the garment with a heat seal press and register that barcode into CleanCloud. Then, for future orders you can just quickly scan that barcode and the garment would be automatically added to the basket for that order. The barcoding on a garment level is very useful for assisted assembly and auto assembly (MetalProgetti or Quicksort).
For assisted assembly, when you scan a garment you will be told which rack location to place that garment. This will allow your staff to quickly scan all items that were just cleaned, and have them group back together into their respective order IDs. You can set how much capacity you have per rack/conveyor location which means that if you have a limit of 5 pieces per rack, then the system would suggest the next free rack/conveyor for you to place your garment on. You can also enable a feature which would mean that once all the garments that form part of the order are scanned, then that order gets moved to the next section where you would then know that that order would need to be delivered back to the store it came from.
For auto assembly we are integrated with MetalProgetti and Quicksort so if you are using them as your conveyor solution, please reach out to your account manager for more information.
I hope this article clarifies the difference between barcoding at an order level and at a garment level and allows you to see where one method is more beneficial than the other.