Taking label ordering off email.

The situation

The client's customers label their own lubrication equipment, and every label is specific: a part number, a colour, a shape, a lubricant code, a viscosity, a manufacturer name — in whichever language the site that uses it operates in.

That configuration was arriving by email. Someone on the client's team read the request, produced artwork by hand, sent a proof back, sent an invoice, and then telephoned to confirm the customer had actually received everything. At a volume of hundreds of labels a week, the process was consuming staff time that had nothing to do with manufacturing — and the customer had no record of what they had ordered last time.

An earlier attempt to solve it with an off-the-shelf storefront had run into the limits of what plugins could be made to do. Label artwork is not a shopping cart problem: each part number has its own template and layout, and the output has to be print-ready rather than merely correct on screen.

What we did

We started with the people doing the work rather than the software. Mapping the current process end to end surfaced the detail that shaped everything afterwards: templates are per part number, not universal, so the system had to be built around that fact rather than around a generic product catalogue.

• A guided configurator that walks a customer from part number to finished artwork, replacing a flat form with a step-by-step build
• Live visual preview, so what the customer approves is what gets printed
• Automatic translation of template content into seven languages at launch, with room to add more without a redesign
• Print-ready PDF generation — a separate file per part number and per colour, each carrying its own quantity
• Order history, so customers can find a previous design and download it again themselves
• An admin side built for the team who actually run it, rather than an inherited plugin interface

Because the company sells through distribution rather than direct, the system deliberately stops short of taking payment. It produces the artwork and the paperwork, then points the customer at the right channel to place the order — matching how the business actually works instead of forcing a direct-to-customer model onto it.

Outcome

Label configuration moved from an email conversation to something a customer completes themselves, with the artwork produced at the end of it and kept on record for reordering.

Continuing work

The relationship has since extended to a customer ordering portal that works against the company's ERP. That engagement began with a discovery phase against the live system rather than against the documentation — which changed several assumptions from the original scope, and was considerably cheaper to find out at that stage than during the build.