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Barcode TechnologySince their invention in the early 1950s barcodes have accelerated the flow of products and information throughout the global business community. Coupled with the improvements in data accuracy that accompanies the adoption of barcode technology over keyboard data entry, barcode systems are critical elements in conducting business in today's global economy. Barcode technology encompasses the symbologies that encode data to be optically read, the printing technologies that produce machine-readable symbols, the scanners and decoders that capture visual images of the symbologies and convert them to computer-compatible digital data, and the verifiers that validate symbol quality. There are many different bar code symbologies, or languages. Each symbology has its own rules for character (e.g. letter, number, punctuation) encodation, printing and decoding requirements, error checking, and other features. The various bar code symbologies differ both in the way they represent data and in the type of data they can encode: some only encode numbers; others encode numbers, letters, and a few punctuation characters; still others offer encodation of the 128-character, and even 256-character, ASCII sets. The newest symbologies include options to encode multiple languages within the same symbol; allow user-defined encodation of special or additional data; and can even allow (through deliberate redundancies) reconstruction of data if the symbol is damaged. At the last count, there were about 225 known bar code symbologies but only a handful of these are in current use and fewer still are widely used. More detailed information for specific areas of Barcode are available: Common Applications:Widespread use of barcode technology began 20 years ago in the supermarket industry and succeeded to the degree that virtually every grocery supplier now uses the U.P.C. symbol on product packaging to enable point-of-sale (POS) scanning. Mass merchandisers as well as a wide range of nongrocery retailers have followed grocers' leads so that POS scanning is now a common fact of retail life. Fifteen years ago, the Department of Defense required all incoming products to include a Code 39 barcode on packaging. This mandate ushered in a wave of manufacturers' implementations of barcode systems beginning at the shipping dock and quickly spreading to the factory floor. On the factory floor, barcode technology was used for time-and-attendance and labor reporting, work in process (WIP), inventory control, and various WIP applications like lot and process control, quality control, and finished goods inventory. Barcode technology then moved to the warehouse for receiving, putaway, picking, and packing applications. Recent economic pressures, as well as increasing global competition, brought a giant wave of downsizing across a range of industries. In an effort to decrease costs and improve productivity, barcode technology became a priority for nearly every industry - from utilities to health care - especially in materials management (a.k.a. logistics) applications. Retail businesses that previously used barcodes only at POS followed Wal-Mart's lead to automate their warehousing and transportation functions and reaped tremendous cost benefits. Barcode technology is also used extensively for such applications as access control, asset tracking, cataloging of books and files by libraries and archives, document management, hazardous waste tracking, package tracking/delivery, and vehicle control/identification. A Look Ahead:The quest for increased efficiency, accuracy, cost containment, and global competitiveness is the future scenario for virtually every industry. Consequently, automated data input technologies will see continued and increasing use in helping businesses achieve these goals. Nothing yet has replaced the 1D barcode as the most cost-effective, machine-readable symbology, and 2D barcodes are quickly moving up the technology developmental curve where increasing options and improvements will be accompanied by decreasing costs. There is no danger of 2D codes replacing the need for 1D codes in many applications, except in certain small parts applications like electronics tracking, where more data increasingly needs to be placed on ever-diminishing real estate. Recommended Reading: Links · Bar Code
Printing Reprinted with permission from AIM, Inc. |
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