How Can the Information from a Scanned Barcode Be Used?

Have you ever wondered about the significance of barcodes on your favorite products? Yes, barcodes play a big role in making our lives easier. From shopping to tracking, barcodes quietly work behind the scenes to help businesses and people.

Let’s look closer at them, their components, the different types, how they work, and the cool things they can do!

What’s Inside a Barcode?

A barcode is a machine-readable representation of information. It consists of bars and spaces of varying width that encode information; this information can be decoded using a barcode scanner.

A barcode has three important layers:

1. Quiet Zone (Margin): Quiet zones are the blank margins on the sides. These margins help scan the barcode correctly. They act like a boundary wall to the barcode, separating it from the outer Zone.
2. Start/Stop Characters: They tell the computer where the barcode begins and ends. These characters are dependent on the type of barcode.
3. Check Digit (Symbol Check Character): The check digit acts as a validation tool, ensuring the accuracy of the encoded data within the barcode. It serves as a fail-safe mechanism to identify any discrepancies in the scanned information.

How Do Barcodes Work?

Understanding how barcodes encode and decode information is interesting. Here’s how it works:

1. Data Entry: Barcodes contain a lot of information like weight, price, and manufacturing date. This data is encoded into the barcode using a barcode generator and then printed.
2. Barcode Symbologies: Different types of barcode symbologies exist, each with its unique code language. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) registers and verifies most barcode formats and symbologies.
3. Scanning and Data Collection: Barcode data can be scanned using various methods. Once scanned, the system retrieves all associated information, such as item description, manufacturing date, and manufacturer details. This information is then translated into readable text or images.
4. Automated Data Entry: The scanner scans the barcode to enter the data into a computer system automatically. This automation saves time and significantly reduces the risk of human errors during data entry.

Use Cases of Barcodes in Various Industries

Barcodes have found widespread use in several industries, thanks to their versatility and effectiveness in storing a variety of information. Industries in which barcode technology has made a special impact include:

1. Pharmaceutical

The pharmaceutical industry is highly reliant on barcode technology to record and track a variety of crucial product information.

• Legal Compliance: Compliance with regulations on the manufacturing, distribution, and usage of products is particularly critical in the pharmaceutical industry. The Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) makes it mandatory to put unique identifiers on certain prescription medicines. Barcodes are the perfect solution to this, helping identify and track each product in compliance with such regulations.
• Preventing Counterfeits: Substandard and counterfeit products have been prevalent in the dynamic and competitive pharmaceutical market for a long time, posing potential health hazards. Thanks to barcodes, verifying the originality of a product is as easy as a quick scan on your smartphone. Additionally, barcodes also allow manufacturers to implement additional anti-counterfeit measures, like serialization and encryption to ensure that a genuine product reaches the customers.
• Product Tracking: Keeping track of large quantities of pharmaceutical products throughout the supply chain can be a real challenge. Barcode labeling enables easy product tracking, allowing companies to track products all the way from the manufacturing location to the final sales outlet.

2. Retail

Barcodes have been implemented extensively in retail stores and have proven to be a game changer.

• Quicker checkouts: Checking out constant queues of customers in a busy store is a daunting task. Barcode scanners integrated into POS systems streamline the whole process, allowing employees to quickly process sales by scanning the items rather than entering data manually.
• Increased Accuracy: Manual data entry is fraught with the risk of errors. Besides simplifying the job for employees, implementing barcode technology eliminates human errors.
• Sales Analytics: Without proper tracking of product sales, it can be difficult for retailers to identify products that are selling well from the slow-moving ones. Barcode implementation allows the seamless and accurate recording of sales data, which can then be analyzed for valuable insights.

3. Warehousing

The efficacy of barcoding in product tracking makes it a valuable technology in the warehousing sector. Here’s how:

• Streamlined Process: Whether your warehouse handles individual products or bulk containers, moving them efficiently through all the processes can be challenging without a streamlined tracking process. Barcodes enable workers to take inventory and record product information with quick scans, speeding up the entire procedure.
• Increased Efficiency: The streamlined processes, in turn, reduce the time it takes to process the goods, improving worker productivity. This, together with real-time data monitoring and integration with a centralized warehouse management system makes the whole warehousing process much more efficient.
• Error-Free: Mistakes in data entry may incur significant costs. Barcodes solve this issue with accurate data recording, eliminating the risk of human errors.

To sum it up, barcodes can go a long way in reducing costs, preventing errors, increasing operational efficiency, and improving labor management. Several types of barcodes find use in the warehousing industry, including Code 39, Code 128, MaxiCode, and more.

Conclusion

In conclusion, barcodes are not just an unassuming pattern of lines and spaces, they are the foundation of countless modern applications. From simplifying inventory management to enhancing the efficiency of invoicing, barcodes are indispensable tools in our fast-paced world.

As technology continues to evolve, barcodes remain a fundamental component of our daily lives, streamlining operations and ensuring accuracy across industries.