Datalinx
Warehouse Management and Barcoding for Sage
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Allocating barcodes to products
A lot of people tend to make a barcode seem more complicated than it actually is. I've always considered that a barcode is a string of characters that are machine readable.
The most common barcodes, and the type that we all see when we do our shopping (remind me to tell you about my retail therapy course some time ;-) ) is known technically as linear or 1D codes typically representing up to 20 characters per code. Whilst there is no reason why a linear barcode should not encode more characters than this, I am told by my technical colleagues at Datalinx, that more than this and the size of the printable code starts to becomes too big or the thinness of the lines within the code becomes too small.
Having been around for a few years (a lady never tells you her age) and not living in a cave. I have to admit that barcodes are everywhere and not just on the food you buy in the supermarket (although that’s the place you usually notice them).
Putting a barcode on an item means it can easily be tracked and counted. Usually this is part of an automation process. The automation bit ensures that the data from the barcode is captured quickly and accurately allowing a business to be more efficient.
Tracking products through the supply chain
This is covered by various acronyms; GS1 global standards / GTIN or EDI and focuses on using barcodes which are machine readable character strings which can be created using linear symbology, are typically between 30-40 characters or could be a matrix code of up to 2000 characters. These symbologies could be compared to a foreign language with syntax and construction rules and industry standard defined codes are EAN or UPC.
Whilst it is easy to blame the warehousing system when you scan a 1D linear barcode and it fails to read, often this is not the case and there is a very simple reason for the error. We often find that it might be a quiet zone failure connected to the printing and/or layout of the barcode itself.
The quiet zone is the empty space area around the barcode that enables the scanning device to establish where the barcode begins and ends and thus allow it to read the label.
There is usually a simple reason for a quiet zone error. It could be that when the barcode was printed on the carton the ink “bled” on the absorbent cardboard and thus made the bars a different width rendering them illegible....
