I like to print our order number on orders I receive from customers so I feed lots of A5 ish sized bits of paper through our printer's sheet feed slot. This results in much paper jamming.
I reckon i'd be better off with a printer that works like a franking machine, does such a thing exist?
Yes, it's called a rubber stamp. If you want something really fancy:
The Star SCP298 is used by pharmacies to endorse prescriptions. It's 9pin dot-matrix with a ribbon, and has a Centronics interface.
They have been around for some time!
Sorry, typo. SP298
Why not simply use a number stamp?
Thought about that.
We book a job in, print the number on the slip and then use that number for invoicing.
I'm the sort of person who would get half way through the day and then notice that the stamp was out of sync with the job numbers.
I need foolproof.
You use the stamper to generate the job numbers. The only error would be if the stamper failed to increment. If you want to have a daily job number sh eet use a stamper that does two-stamps-per-increment to stamp both the orde r form and the job sheet with the same number.
Or you can buy sheets or rolls of barcoded labels in sequence (or make them yourself with a barcode font and a spreadsheet), stick one on each order f orm. With the right software you can then scan the order forms and the scan ning software will recognise the barcode and tag or name the scanned image accordingly.
Owain
Only if you forget to stamp one of the documents you need the same number on before moving onto the next one. They automatically advance the number after a chosen number of stamps.
We used them for medical product traceability, handling around one million products per annum. How much more foolproof do you need? :-)
[snip]
Print a sheet of sequentially numbered (small) labels?
We just write the number on the order. We use a pen.
Bill
Get a better fool.
Bill
I suspect the IT system might like to do that
and if it clicks over an odd number of times you end up with order form and job sheet out of sync ... not foolproof.
Might be getting close, if the pairs of barcodes are printed e.g on contrasting coloured labels, so an order form with a jobsheet sticker on it would stick out like a sore thumb.
I've never known one to do that and I had several in use for many years.
Why would that matter, if all you need is the number? You could always print JOB and ORDER prominently on the labels if it is important to use a specific label on a specific form.
Because if there was just a continuous roll of pairs of barcodes, you could easily get out of sync, and end-up with different numbers on the job from the order. Colour (if chosen wisely) is an easier way to glance at the whole batch of order/job forms to see if any are misapplied, rather than looking for the word "ORDER" or "JOB".
Adrian put finger to keyboard:
How did you manage to swallow *that*?
You don't say whether your printer is used for other purposes and whether you'd be happy with two printers.
But if two printers would work for you, you could buy a simple label printer, print a label with the number on it, and stick the label on the order.
That seems hardly any different from your current (presumably foolproof enough for the fool(s) in question) procedure, but avoids problems caused by putting customers' stationery through your existing printer. It has the advantage that the labels could be made more distinctive and could be placed wherever you like on each order.
A label printer could produce the labels in pairs, which you then use before printing the next pair. Very difficult to get out of sync if you only have exactly the right number of labels. You probably could even get one that takes the number produced by your IT system and prints that onto the labels.
Different colours are not that straightforward, unless you have two entirely separate rolls, in which case getting out of sync would be much easier. It would be simpler to have something very distinctive on one label, say a thick black line top and bottom, particularly if you are printing them yourself.
Depending on throughput, one way to do this - tag a customers order with an internal order number - is to scan the incoming orders, import the image into a tow page document of which the second page is in fact your internal metadata for the order.
But te wqay I tackled this last time was top create a new sales order and have a section of database reserved for 'customers order number' and 'other customer details' so that the actual PO itself was no longer really required except for archive purposes.
I have a Dymo LabelWriter 450. It prints onto rolls of sticky labels, one at a time. Probably just exactly what the OP needs.
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