Asset labels that survive a workshop

Labelling is the part of an asset register that people spend the least time on and lose the most to. The register is designed carefully, the scanners are chosen on merit, and then four hundred labels are ordered from whoever came up first — and eighteen months later a third of them are unreadable and nobody can say exactly when it happened.

A failed label is worse than no label because it fails quietly. The asset is still on the register, still shows as available, and simply cannot be scanned — so it gets recorded by hand, or not at all.

Direct thermal is the mistake

Two printing technologies look identical on the shelf. Direct thermal burns the image into heat-sensitive paper. Thermal transfer melts a ribbon onto the label.

Direct thermal labels darken with heat and fade with UV. In a warm workshop, in sunlight through a roof light, or on anything near a machine, they go grey within months and black if they get hot. They are right for a shipping label that has a job to do for three days. They are wrong for anything that has to be readable next year.

If a label is going to outlive the week, it needs a ribbon. Every workshop that has re-labelled its whole tool store learned this the expensive way.

Material, by what the thing lives in

Ribbon type matters as much as the label. Wax is cheap and rubs off; wax-resin is the sensible middle; full resin is what you want on anything that gets handled, cleaned or left outside. Ordering polyester labels and then wax ribbon is a common and self-defeating combination.

Where to put it

Placement kills more labels than material does.

• Not where hands go. The grip of a tool is the worst possible place and the most tempting, because it is flat.
• Not on a curved surface smaller than the label. Adhesive lifts at the edges and then catches on something.
• Not over a join, a hinge, or a serial plate you may need to read later.
• Somewhere consistent. If the label is always on the same face, somebody can scan without hunting — and hunting is what makes people give up and type.
• Where a scanner can see it while the tool is in a rack. A label on the underside is a label that requires lifting.

Surface preparation is the boring half. Adhesive fails on oily, dusty or cold surfaces, and most workshop metal is at least two of those. A wipe with isopropyl alcohol before applying costs seconds and roughly doubles the life of the bond.

What to print on it

The barcode, obviously — Code 128 for anything alphanumeric, and give it a quiet zone at each end, because a barcode printed edge to edge will not read reliably no matter how good the scanner is.

Also print the code in human-readable characters underneath. It costs nothing and it is what saves the day when the barcode is scratched, when somebody is on the phone, or when the label is photographed rather than scanned. A barcode-only label has one failure mode and no fallback.

Resist putting anything else on it. Company name, department, "property of" — all of it consumes the space that makes the barcode readable, and none of it is what the label is for. If ownership marking matters, that is a second, separate label.

When not to use a label at all

Some things should not carry an adhesive label: anything that goes in a parts washer, anything that gets hot, anything with no flat surface bigger than a thumbnail. For those, the manufacturer’s serial number is your identifier and the register does the work — which is a good reason to record serial numbers on everything, rather than relying on a tag you have applied.

Nilstock generates Code 128 barcodes for items and assets so labels can be printed from the catalogue rather than kept in a separate list, and resolves a serial number as readily as a tag — so an unlabelled tool is still findable. On choosing what reads them, see choosing a barcode scanner for a store room; on what the label points at, what belongs in an asset register.