Groupement pour l’Amélioration des Liaisons dans l’Industrie Automobile
Groupement pour l’Amélioration des Liaisons dans l’Industrie Automobile
31/10/2024
40 years of GALIA labels
More than any other object, labels are a marker of our association’s achievements. In such a way that in many plants these little pieces of paper, so outdated, so useful, are associated with our acronym: “What is written on the GALIA?“
The various ETI label standards in French and OTL – Odette Transport Label – in their versions taken up by Odette in English, have enabled the handling, storage and use of billions of products, packaged in different forms: Transport Handling Unit, homogeneous or heterogeneous, Packaging Unit, sheet metal coil, individual product, in both series and after-sales logistics flows.
The label is a brick within a coherent whole made up of the logistics operating modes of the automobile industry and the means used. Beyond the standardisation of dimensions, printing masks, the data contained, printing quality standards, the weight of the paper to be respected… labels are inseparable from the industrial exploitation of barcodes, allowing the labels to be “flashed” and paired with the data transmitted by EDI, or contained in information systems.
During our work, the label standards have benefited from some minor developments: precisions, visual identification of Right or Left part, possibility of integrating a globally unique identification number, possibility of associating the label with an RFID tag… But ultimately what characterises best the label standards is their remarkable stability, proof of their efficiency and their ability to provide the expected services.
Now, we are considering a paperless world! And yet the paradox is that the future of the ETI, OTL (and VDA) label standards is in fact another label: the GTL – Global Transport Label – supporting a 2D Datamatrix format barcode and offering customisation options for Customers or Suppliers. This standard is deployed according to opportunities, often greenfield projects or harmonization of labels of the n tiers of the supply chain.
In an era of automation, AutoID systems, digital twins… the persistence of the paper label is also the indicator that sooner or later in our industrial processes, a human still needs to see or read crucial information from scratch.