Earlier this year, Label Traxx, the leading Print MIS/ERP for the labels and flexible packaging segment, was purchased by Amtech Software, the developers of EnCore, the leading ERP for the corrugated packaging and folding carton segments.

The acquisition included the Label Traxx ERP and two strategically integrated products, Batched Automated Scheduling and the Siteline Online Portal.

To learn more about the acquisition, L&NW caught up with Jennifer Matt, the founder of Siteline and a minority owner in Label Traxx.

L&NW: How did the three companies – Label Traxx, Batched, and Siteline – come together to work as one and then be sold together?
JM: My path into this partnership started when my custom software development firm Web2Print Experts, Inc. was hired by Steve Smith, founder of both Lightning Labels and Wizard Labels (two of the most successful B2C players in the label space), to build out the Wizard Labels ordering site. I still joke with Steve and his co-founder, Jay Dolories, that they were my professors, and I was in label school. Jay was the founder of ILS Labels in Ohio. During this project, Wizard was remarkably successful, driving business into the ILS facility. That is where I met Ken Meinhardt, the co-founder and CEO of Label Traxx because ILS ran their business on the Label Traxx ERP. So, in truth I had three label professors, who collectively had more than 80+ years of experience in this space – lucky me.

As Wizard continued to take off, delivering hundreds of orders into the ILS facility each week, scheduling and capacity planning became critical. That is where Batched comes in. Matt Murphy, one of the founders of Batched working as a business process consultant at ILS, was tasked with solving the scheduling challenge (he was literally asked to do the scheduling when the scheduler was out unexpectedly). We watched Matt and his team devour every detail about label printing and transform it into an application that both delivered on the optimization and schedulers enjoyed using.

During the Wizard project I observed a need for a label specific online portal to ease the burden of customer service and give label buyers a way to place orders, approve artwork, and collaborate online for their existing customer base. So, our origin story happened organically and completely “in the trenches.” Every single feature of Siteline and Batched was built by not just listening to the customers but being on the job with them. I sat with customer service teams; Matt stood on the production floor with schedulers and manufacturing folks. Ken and the Label Traxx team continued to be the first to support new digital printing workflows because ILS and Jay (former president of Dscoop) were early adopters of HP digital technology.

What I love about this origin story is that all three of us had direct experience with the specific challenges of running a label converting business. Ken worked on a production floor when he formulated the idea for Label Traxx 30+ years ago. That is why we made such a good team – we shared this desire to first understand the challenges and then apply software to ease the burden of the end users (employees), which results in improved efficiencies, lower labor costs, and better outcomes.

L&NW: Why did you decide to sell now?
JM: Over the last couple of years, we were able to make huge strides with all three platforms. We revamped the entire Label Traxx user experience. I like to say we got some women involved in the design decisions. Label Traxx expanded its core technology to support enterprise customers with multiple manufacturing locations, added a cloud-based Data Warehouse, and a Cloud API. All these moves made Label Traxx easier to integrate with, the data more accessible to other systems like business intelligence, and more scalable for the rapid consolidation taking place in the industry.

Siteline and Batched continued to innovate in their respective areas of the plant via modern cloud-based platforms. Siteline targets the unique challenges of the front office, what we refer to as the carpeted area of the plant (customer service, sales, estimating, prepress, accounts receivable), while Batched focuses on production (capacity planning, scheduling, material planning/staging and the shop floor).

We tripled the size of our team over the last couple of years and yet we were not satisfied with how fast we could go and our ability to respond to what the market demanded. For example, several customers wanted Batched and Siteline to work on other ERP systems because the consolidation in this space is forcing companies to work in mixed ERP environments. Last year Batched deployed their scheduling solution to a large, multi-site company whose business spans across labels and folded cartons running Radius as their ERP.

Siteline is being pushed to solve collaboration challenges across the entire front office, from sales, estimating, customer service, and prepress. Literally Siteline customers are shaving days off labor consuming tasks like chasing auditable agreements on artwork approvals and job specifications. It is a valuable feedback loop when you can deliver jobs into scheduling a few days sooner and you have an automated scheduling platform in Batched that can take full advantage of those extra days to optimize the utilization of roll stock, presses, and labor.

L&NW: What made you choose Amtech Software as the buyer?
JM: More than anything we wanted to sell to a strategic partner that would enable us to scale both in who we can sell our solutions to and what our solutions can do for our current customer base. The EnCore ERP from Amtech Software has a similar trajectory to Label Traxx. Multiple decades of history in the corrugated and folded carton segments of the packaging industry.

Today’s Amtech Software is now led by a team of seasoned ERP executives from Oracle, Infor, etc. Label Traxx, Batched, and Siteline are benefiting from this expanded perspective and general ERP expertise. Amtech is benefiting from the innovation embedded in applications like Siteline. The Siteline team brings decades of knowledge about all aspects of “web-to-print” – the unique complexities of ordering custom manufactured products online. I like to remind people who think print online ordering is like ordering widgets from Amazon with this statement:

“Imagine if Amazon had to collect a critical component of the widget at the time of purchase from every unsophisticated buyer?”

That is print e-commerce. The artwork is a critical component that impacts everything (price, manufacturing process, tooling, and scheduling). The acquisition strategically puts all three products; Label Traxx, Batched, and Siteline, into a company that was built to scale. The product teams are already collaborating to solve common technical and workflow challenges.

L&NW: How do you see ERP solutions servicing the packaging market evolving over the coming years? 
JM: From my viewpoint, there is a clear separation between the “holder of data” and the “presenter of data” to make better decisions. The ERPs (Label Traxx and EnCore) are the trusted system of records for the business – their job is to capture and hold the data. This data needs to be presented to the right people, in the right format, at the right time. This does not necessarily have to be done by the core ERP.

In the case of Label Traxx, Siteline created the “view into” the Label Traxx data for the customer, the customer service team, and now the sales team. Batched created a view of the orders ready to be scheduled, visualization of the roll stock inventories, and capacity planning in a cloud interface that subscribes to the data in Label Traxx. Amtech customers will benefit from both solutions.

Amtech Software has two data presenting packages that will be of immediate value to the Label Traxx customers. Amtech Visual Analytics is a configurable business intelligence platform that will sit on top of the Label Traxx Data Warehouse. ScoreKeeper is a shop floor broadcaster of equipment utilization in real-time that will communicate directly with equipment and integrate with Label Traxx.

This is another big advantage we gained through the acquisition. Both companies are sharing these solutions to extend the core data of the ERP into every corner of the business, so employees are set up to make the best decisions based on the most up-to-date information.

L&NW: What do you see as additional challenges that still need to be addressed via software in the labels and packaging space?
JM: One of the areas I see is estimating as the last “untouchable” place that needs to be reimagined. Like other print segments, there is a religious attachment to the superbly skilled estimator. They have been untouchable as far as any attempts to automate or streamline that area of the business. Quoting is a race and if you continue to push every single job into a formal and manual estimating process designed for perfection over speed, you are crawling. I was in a conversation with the person who controlled the entire print spend (hundreds of millions) of a global bank, they said, “We require three quotes, but we do not require that the procurement officer waits to see all of them before they make a decision.” Just look at the online world where there is instant pricing rather than requesting a quote for straightforward label orders. Everything about the online world is democratization of complex processes. Estimating custom printed products on any substrate (label, box, folded carton, paper) is no exception.

One of the default actions we take in the face of resistance to change is to try to make concessions to the people who are resistant. You know those employees that say, “But we’ve always done it this way,” or, “My customers want to talk to our team; they don’t want to go online.”

L&NW: How do you recommend label converters deal with internal resistance to change?
JM: This is the core differentiator between the successful label converters and the rest of the pack. The equipment manufacturers want you to believe it is the press, the software makers want you to believe it is the software. You want to believe it is your people. I agree with you, it is your people starting with you – the leader and your ability and willingness to adapt to change yourselves and then lead your people through the changes required to stay competitive. I have witnessed two competitors with the exact same equipment and software with profitability and growth figures spread by 10 points. Knowing both businesses, I would say the number one difference was leadership and willingness to adapt their process to innovative technology and ideas.

We cannot control change. It is happening with or without our consent. Do we focus on trying to make our people more comfortable by making compromises (letting them continue old patterns), or do we actively help them with the coping skills required to deal with change? 

L&NW: When will we see you in public as Amtech Software?
JM: Label Traxx has been attending Labelexpo in both the US and Europe for decades. September 10-12, 2024, in Chicago, IL, we will be at Labelexpo as Amtech Software, displaying our latest enhancements to Label Traxx, Batched, and Siteline, as well as some of the emerging synergies with Amtech Software.