Hello,
My company is looking at starting to use barcodes on all the part bins. We are looking for a system that will integrate with epicor, but still allow us the flexibility to change the bin labels as we see fit. There are lots of post about Bartender being as it is the system that Epicor suggests to it’s customers. One of our IT people has a lot of experience with Nicelabel and has expressed how nice it is to be able to control the consistency with how the labels look by only allowing people to print a certain way. I am wonder what everyone’s experiences are with either system and why they feel we should go with that system over the other.
I feel like I see a lot more posts about bartender than nice label, so if you have a question I suspect you will get more help with bartender. Doesn’t mean its the better tool, but its a variable to consider.
No experience with Nicelabel so can’t speak to that.
We used Bartender for a long time, and it is incredible software.
We stopped using it do to wanting more control. Bartender operates under a per printer license. Anything else that touches those printers can cause Bartender to lock it out and refuse to use the printer until you get Bartender support to unlock the account. They are usually extremely quick with this and have great customer service… except when they don’t. We had a printer lock up and it took 3 days to get them to unlock it. This was a 3 day period where out shipping and receiving department had to go back to hand labeling everything which was clearly not ideal and so we switched to using SSRS to print out labels (it takes some work, but you can print bar codes in SSRS).
I would however point out that in every case where we had this issue prior, Bartender support was amazing and very responsive. We just did not like having to rely on outside support in order to make our printers work.
I don’t have any experience with Nicelabel. Bartender experience has been wonderful. Easy to use, easy to set up, multiple different options, support is fantastic (I think we have an upgraded maintenance agreement, which we arguably don’t need anymore. VB Scripts if you want to get real funky with your labels.
My only complaint with them is how they license printers. If I remember correctly they do it by the printer name, and licenses take a week to expire. So if a printer dies and you need to replace it, you either have to wait a week for the license to expire or call them and get manager approval to reset the usage. Or if you test a printer from a different computer while you get your labels set up it consumes a license for a week. Real stupid.
Other than that it’s a breeze.
We also use SSRS for labels, but we only have a few label types, few label printing locations and not that many printed so it works out fine for us. Seems like a number of people are quite surprised that we don’t have bartender.
Yes! This “test a label with a different printer and you’re shut out for a week”. It’s been incredibly irritating to us and frankly I would not recommend the product due to it. At insights others provided solutions for doing the labels DIY, I would consider this (search on this site) or another product for sure.
The way I’ve always used bartender is to drop a file in a folder location that bartender monitors and picks up the file to print the label. So it’s not tightly integrated at all. You can use more advanced methods, but that’s worked for us. I’ve always just programmed the CSV file creation and drop rather than using the built in epicor ones.
I say that, because if the other product can work like that, it should work just fine. You’ll just have to adjust your drop file to work with whatever format the software is looking for.
This could be more of a challenge for cloud users, as file access is a lot more limited, but since your version says 10, I’m assuming that you are on premise, and shouldn’t have those issues.
It is not. Had BarTender at my old company on the cloud and it worked seamlessly. I also went the route of dropping text files to a location for BT to pick up and print.
Old fashion labeler with a keyboard on it. They currently don’t use barcodes for anything. It’s an improvement we desperately need and are working towards.
We currently use Bartender with Epicor, but another division in our company, using a different ERP, uses several label-making software(s), including Nicelabel. They love Nicelabel. So it sounds like new territory for many of us Epicor users, but I think it’s worth exploring.
I haven’t heard of Nicelabel, I know Epicor and Bartender talk well together as long as you understand what they want to hear. We have integrated Bartender to print receiving labels automatically, once the received button is checked. Works really well. I have found that Epicor Upgrades mess up my Data Definition’s almost every time. I have now exported them so I can just re-import them back in. I would be happy to share if your interested.
We use Bartender and NiceLabel. We’ve used NiceLabel for years - long before we had Epicor. Our users prefer NiceLabel and that’s where most of the custom labels are. If you have specific questions happy to try and answer.
the replacement for SSRS that we are looking for actually prints labels very well.. it even supports printing of barcodes and QR Codes without any additional addins. Besides QR Codes, it also supports Code 128, UPC-A, EAN-13 without needing to install a barcode font.
All that to say… you may not need to acquire a specialty label printing software package in the future to print your labels.
Be sure to share this with your collogues at AdvancedMES. They have their own label printing solution and (Safe Harbor ) are planning to move from that solution to BarTender.
)