Customer Challenge

SATO customer is a popular convenience store and gas station with more than 50 locations and is growing nationwide. The customer uses Hobart scales to print the ingredient/price labels for food prepared in the stores. Production information is pushed to the scales from their scale management software, eplum. While some items needed to be weighed, they were also printing labels for items that did not need to be weighed. Some scales were only used in select locations to print labels for non-weighed products. They wanted a cost-efficient and smaller printer for food items that did not need to be weighed. This printer would need to work with their eplum application.

SATO's Solution

SATO created an AEP app that runs on the FX3-LX printer and understands the data format that eplum sends to the printers. It uses this information to populate screen menus and the ingredient/price label. This allowed us to provide a competitively priced printer with the following advantages.

• The printer prints on linerless media, eliminating liner waste.
• The Hobart printers are 200 DPI and the FX3 is 300 DPI. This results in a very noticeable improvement in print quality, including the customer’s logo.
• The application allows them to select how many labels they want to print for a specific product. The printer prints a label and waits until it is removed before it prints the next one. A label is constantly printed and waiting to be taken, keeping anyone waiting for the printer to print. The feedback was that this allowed them to prepare more sandwiches per hour than when using the other printer.
• The printer has a large touch screen and is smaller than the other printer, freeing up valuable counter space.

SATO’s Success

The SATO FX3-LX proved to be a capable drop-in replacement for the Hobart scales. Increasing operator efficiency and producing a superior label.