Barcodes

We purchase various product all the time and each time we do that, we interact with a barcode, but rarely or almost never do we give them any notice. Yet barcodes are a very crucial part in the effective and efficient running of any economy, from small businesses to large multinational companies.

So, What is a Barcode anyway?

Basically a barcode is a machine-identifiable code in the form of numbers and patterns of parallel lines with varying widths. But in reality a barcode is much more than that. Barcode systems today are an inevitable part of businesses and organizations which are used to track products, prices, and stock levels for management in a centralized computer software system allowing for exponential increases in productivity and efficiency.

The lines on a barcode are actually numbers and data and their pattern allowed basic information about any product to be conveniently read by a scanning device which is called a barcode scanner. This barcode scanner automatically enters all the product related data into a computer system. This duo vastly reduced the time to record product information and almost completely eliminated the potential for error in human data entry.

Barcodes initially came out with simple 1-D designs, consisting of simple black lines that could only be read by special barcode scanners. However, today barcodes come in a wide range of designs and most of them can even be read by mobile phones and other electronic devices.

Some historical aspects about Barcodes!!

The barcode has a very long and interesting history from its initial stages of development nearly 70 years ago. The technology behind the barcode is constantly changing, and we are always discovering ways to put more and more information into these codes. It all started in 1949 on a beach when Joseph Woodland, a mechanical engineer at Drexel University, drew a set of parallel lines in the sand that “represented a kind of ‘long form’ of dots and dashes” or Morse code. Woodland had been thinking about the ways Morse code might be used to solve a problem his colleague Bernard Silver had presented to him. Months earlier, Silver had overheard the president of a grocery chain appeal to the dean of Drexel University to help him devise a system to automate the grocery checkout process.

On the fine day of October 20, 1949, Silver and Woodland filed a patent for a “Classifying Apparatus and Method”, this was the first barcode concept. They were finally awarded their patent in October 1952, and while this idea was intriguing to many companies and industries, the scanning technology aka the barcode reader, which would actually allow the barcode to become one of the most important symbols in the world did not yet existed.

The 1950s and 1960s were very happening for the barcode technology as various companies and industries tried very hard to develop the barcode technology. The first implementation was that of KarTrak system which was developed by David Collins from the Boston and Maine Railroad company. This system was then selected as the standard by the Association of American Railroads and by the year 1974, almost 95% of the AAR fleet was tagged with this system. But, the system could never become fully functional and its use was discontinued in the late 1970s.

The actual breakthrough that lead to the global outreach of barcodes was the invention of the Universal Product Code. In 1966 the National Association of Food Chains began to ponder over the idea of automated checkout systems. At that time, RCA had the rights to Silver and Woodland’s original patent and they had began a project to develop an effective system.

After that, in the mid of 1970s, the NAFC in U.S. established the Supermarket Ad Hoc Committee on a Uniform Grocery Product Code, to create the basic guidelines for barcode technology development and an effective and usable coding system. This finally led to the creation of the standardized 11-digit code to identify products.

IBM also jumped in by employing George Lauer to begin work on what would become the standard UPC linear 1-Dimentional barcode. The critical moment was in 1974 on June 26th when the first ever barcode was scanned in a supermarket in Troy, Ohio. It was a pack of Juicy Fruit gum from Wrigley’s.

Over the times, barcode has evolved from simple lines to complicated 2-D designs and in the contemporary world, they help people track everything from a can of coke to the top secret documents in the Department of Defense.

Some Important types of Barcodes

Code 128

Code 128 is a high-density linear barcode symbology. It is used for alphanumeric or numeric-only barcodes. It can encode all 128 characters of ASCII and, by use of an extension symbol (FNC4), the Latin-1 characters also.

A Code 128 barcode has seven parts:

Part 1: Quiet zone
Part 2: Start symbol
Part 3: Encoded data
Part 4: Check symbol (mandatory)
Part 5: Stop symbol
Part 6: Final bar (considered part of stop symbol sometimes)
Part 7: Quiet zone

The check symbol is then calculated by a weighted sum (modulo 103) of all symbols.

EAN 13

International Article Number (aka European Article Number or EAN) is a standard of barcode symbology used in the global trade to identify a retail product, in a specific packaging, packaged by a specific manufacturer. The standard has now been subsumed in the Global Trade Item Number standard by the GS1 organization; the same numbers can be called as GTINs and can be coded in other barcode symbologies defined by GS1. EAN barcodes are used all over the world for lookup at retail points of sale, but they are also used as numbers for other purposes like wholesale ordering.

The most commonly used standard is the thirteen-digit EAN-13, which is the superset of the 12-digit Universal Product Code standard developed in 1970 by George J. Laurer. An EAN-13 number includes a 3-digit GS1 prefix which indicates the country of registration or a special type of product. A prefix with first digit “0” indicates a 12-digit UPC-A code will follow. A prefix with first two digits of “45” or “49” indicate that Japanese Article Number (JAN) will follow.

HOW DO BARCODES FUNCTION?

Barcodes work by a combination of a symbology and a barcode scanner that can read those symbology and convert it into useful information. The barcodes often provides us with information related to a product’s origin, type, price, and location. The scanner scans the barcode and puts all the information stored in it into a system which is often some type of database.

Some of the ways businesses use barcodes:

Keeping a track of inventory. An inventory tracking system consists of a software and a barcode scanner. Inventory items will have barcode labels. When you remove any item from stock, you just scan the barcode to adjust the available count in the inventory tracking software, instead of having to type in all the details.
Keeping a track of assets. Businesses, no matter how big or small, has multiple assets. Barcoded asset tags are attached to each of the assets, and can be scanned to check items in or out in your tracking software. It’s a great method to improve accountability and makes audits much easier.
One easy way to incorporate barcodes into your business is to use a complete barcode system which are available in the market. However, there are also many online tools that you can use to generate barcodes without any investment. Just google free barcode generator to find a free tool and start creating a barcode for your business.