Having been used in commerce and elsewhere for over 50 years, bar codes have a proven track record to make the operation of businesses around the world more effective. When the solution is applied with thought and planning, bar codes have demonstrated to be an incredibly successful tool for managing costs, reducing errors, and providing visibility to the supply chain. Many agencies and customers impose bar code labeling compliance standards that must be met.

Barcodes are efficient

Bar codes permit faster and more accurate transfer and recording of information benefiting the track of work in process or the movement of assets more quickly and precisely. Significant time can be spent tracking down the location of assets, instruments, materials, anything that moves within a location or between companies. Bar codes can help speed the processes and improve the tracking of these items, saving your organization time in response to inquiries and change, because you can track exactly where items are.

Barcodes save time

Depending on the application, the time-savings can be very significant when a bar coding solution is successfully implemented. Often the most dramatic examples involve the tasks of inventory. One SATO customer required a crew of 25 employees working over a weekend for mid-year inventory; once they implemented bar codes this was reduced to 4 employees completing the inventory in 5 hours. Routine daily operations have a positive impact in saving time and resource as the use of bar codes expand and improve productivity. Consider another SATO customer who professed processing a shipment of 10 cartons of their product to a retail outlet customer. Previous to them embracing a bar code system; it took approximately 2-4 minutes, sometime more, to write down product codes and product serial numbers compared to 10 to 20 seconds now to scan the bar codes - and without numerical, description transposing errors. In a large operation this lead to significant reductions in time.

Barcodes reduce errors

Clerical and data entry errors can bring irreparable damage to a business leading to: higher freight costs, unhappy customers, and enormous time used to track down problems. In some situations, clerical errors can have a much more dramatic impact; as example the critical importance of data and product accuracy in pharmaceutical, patient safety or blood bank applications. Errors here can be irreparable to a business image and reputation, and in many instances bring about legal ramifications. We know the typical error rate for human data entry is 1 per 300 characters. That's a crushing statistic leading to potentially millions of lost profits across business sectors. Bar code printing and scanners are much more accurate; the error rate can be as good as 1 error in 36 trillion characters depending on the type of bar code and printing solution used.

Advantages of Barcode | disadvantages of Barcode

This page covers advantages and disadvantages of Barcode. It mentions Barcode advantages or benefits and Barcode disadvantages or drawbacks. It also describes Barcode basics.

What is Barcode?

Introduction:
Barcode is predefined format of dark bars and white bars. The bars are structured to contain specific piece of information. Barcode scanner consists of three parts viz. illuminator, converter and decoder. The barcode scanner works based on electro-optical principle.

There are two ways to create barcodes viz. discrete symbology and continuous symbology. In discrete symbology, each character is mapped using stack of dark and white bars and gaps are provided between each characters. In continuous symbology, gaps are provided after few characters are represented together using dark/white bars continuously.

There are two types of barcodes viz. linear Barcodes and 2D Barcodes. The linear barcodes include code-128, UPC, code-39 etc. The 2D barcodes include PDF417, data matrix, maxicode etc. There are international standards to have uniformity in different barcodes.

Example: The Code-39 format based barcodes define 9 bars in order to represent each symbol. It defines about 43 characters.

The figure-1 depicts barcode scanning process. As shown in this process light is emitted towards barcode and reflected light is received by the scanning device in order to decode the information. Refer Barcode basics >>.

Benefits or advantages of Barcode

Following are the benefits or advantages of Barcode:
➨It allows realtime data to be collected accurately and rapidly with the help of barcode readers.
➨It enables fast data entry operations with less errors.
➨It is mature and proven technology.
➨It is less expensive.
➨It is smaller and lighter compare to RFID tags and easy to use.

Drawbacks or disadvantages of Barcode

Following are the disadvantages of Barcode:
➨Barcode scanning requires special device called Barcode scanner which emits light and collects reflected light to decode the Barcode.
➨Barcode scanner or reader works with computers or POS terminals.
➨Barcodes do not have read/write capabilities.
➨It requires optical line of sight (LOS) scanning.
➨It is labour intensive as it requires to be scanned individually.
➨It is less secure compare to RFID which can be easily forged.
➨It is susceptible to environmental damage.
➨scratched or crumpled barcodes may cause problems while scanning.

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