11/09/2026
A technician scans a pump’s asset tag. Nothing.
The pump is sitting right there, but the barcode has faded and the corner is peeling, so as far as your system is concerned, it doesn’t exist.
Labels are some of the cheapest items on the bill of materials, but they connect every asset to your ERP, WMS, CMMS, and compliance records. When they fail, the costs add up fast:
- Ghost assets. Industry estimates put 10–30% of recorded fixed assets as no longer actually owned. Unreadable tags lead to duplicate purchases, inflated taxes and insurance, and painful audit findings.
- Labor drain. 200 failed scans a day at 30 seconds each works out to roughly 417 hours and $14,600 a year, and that’s labor alone. Manual entry workarounds also bring more errors.
- Supply chain blind spots. One bad label creates a gap that every downstream partner inherits: misrouted shipments, phantom inventory, retailer chargebacks, and wider recalls.
The fix usually costs less over an asset’s life than the failure does: match the material, adhesive, and print method to the real environment, test before rolling out, and audit scan rates regularly.
Learn more at our recent blog: https://hubs.li/Q04DQy_Y0