In our depots a parcel cannot leave without a carrier label, and the label comes out of a thermal printer costing about four hundred pounds. We have a hundred and twelve of them. Last year they raised more tickets than any other device class and cost more dispatch time than every server fault put together.
When I finally looked, I found fourteen models from five manufacturers. Sites had bought them locally from the office supplies catalogue whenever one failed, because printers were filed under consumables. Four of the models are no longer made. Several printed through a server at head office, so a depot in the south west could not label a parcel whenever its link to head office dropped. Label rolls were ordered by whichever supervisor noticed the stock running low, and twice somebody bought a cheaper roll whose adhesive failed in the chilled area, which produced carrier rejections that nobody traced back to the paper for weeks.
The carriers also change their label formats. Two did so last year with about a month's notice, sent to an address in the logistics team, and both times a batch of parcels came back unscannable because the template on some of our printers had not been updated.
Nobody had been negligent. It was a classification made years ago: printers are peripherals, peripherals are cheap, and cheap things are bought by whoever needs one. That was right for the printer on the second floor of head office. It was wrong for a device standing between a picked order and a departing trailer.
Dispatch printers are now treated as part of the warehouse system rather than accessories to it. There are two approved models, bought centrally, and every dispatch bench has a configured spare within reach. Each depot prints locally instead of through head office. The printers are monitored like any other endpoint, including head wear and label stock. Labels are one approved product on a standing order. Carrier format notices come to a shared mailbox my team reads, and we print a test label for each carrier before the change date.
It cost about thirty thousand pounds over two years, most of it retiring the old models. Dispatch time lost to printers is down by roughly four fifths.
The device that decides whether a lorry leaves on time costs about the same as a desk chair, and we had been buying it as if it were one.
– Serguey Shinder
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