Free tool

Heat and lot labels, three per lot, from one number

One identifier on the rack, on the mill certificate and on the traveler. Type the heat number and the sheet builds itself. It runs entirely in your browser, nothing is sent to us or stored, and there is no sign up.

How the trail actually breaks Our other free tools
A large steel round bar clamped in a horizontal bandsaw mid cut, coolant running over the freshly cut face

The receipt

One piece, one lot. Do not assign them to jobs yet. The cut is what creates the link between a lot and a job, and material allocated on a screen at receipt is the first thing the floor works around.

Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to us or stored anywhere, which matters because these fields hold supplier and PO numbers.

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Where each one goes

Three labels, one identifier

The identifier is the same on all three. That is the whole trick, and it is why the sheet prints them together.

The rack label goes on the materialOn the end that stays on the rack, not the end you cut from. Get that backwards and every remnant comes back untraceable, which is the most common way a cert trail dies. On anything living in coolant, write the lot over the top in paint pen as well; stickers do not survive.
The certificate label goes on the mill certOne per heat, listing every lot it covers. Then scan it once. The certificate is correct and specific the day it arrives, and the reason it becomes useless is that it gets filed by supplier and month instead of attached to the material.
The traveler label goes on the routingStuck on the paperwork when the bar is cut. It is not strictly needed if the link is already recorded digitally, but it lets the operator confirm at a glance that he has the right material, and it lets inspection confirm the same thing without asking anyone to remember.

Why the heat number

Not the purchase order, and not the delivery

The certificate belongs to a heat of steel. A service center can fill one line of your order from two or three heats without doing anything wrong and without that being obvious on the packing slip.

So if your identifier is the PO or the order line, you can merge heats on the rack and never notice. The bill comes later, when a customer asks for the certificate covering a specific part and you have two certificates, one job, and nothing that says which bar it came out of.

Key it to the heat at receipt and that failure cannot happen. You also end up holding country of melt against the same record, which is turning into its own problem on the customs side.

Being straight with you

What this does not do

There is no barcode on these labels, on purpose. We have not test-scanned a symbology on your scanner, and a mis-encoded barcode on a traceability label does not fail visibly, it reads as a different lot. So the identifier is short and in large type instead. If you want it machine readable, the CSV export above loads into the label printer you already own, which will encode it properly.

It does not track anything. It prints labels. The part that actually gives you traceability is the link made at the saw and the rule that stops an untraceable part shipping, and that lives in your system rather than on a sticker.

Next step

Labels are the easy half.

The part that gives you traceability is the link made at the saw and the rule that stops an untraceable part shipping. If you want that built into what you already run, it is usually three to eight weeks.

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