Automate Your Business With Barcodes

Regardless of the industry, organizations are constantly looking for cost-effective ways to increase productivity. In a competitive market, it is imperative that companies constantly strive to find innovative ways to do more with less. Nowhere is this more evident than in businesses with processes that are paper-intensive. These businesses often face challenges when it comes to categorizing and centralizing their information.

Fortunately, barcode technology can help organizations to simplify these processes with automated indexing. Barcodes are highly reliable and consistent, providing assurance that indexing is accurate. Barcodes can also designate which destination a document should have when it enters an automated workflow. Businesses employ barcodes for vastly different reasons, yet they usually experience similar results: better accuracy, less opportunity for error, and substantial savings in time and money.

Background:

Barcode technology is a form of optical character recognition (OCR) that consists of machine-readable information that is used to store data. It is less expensive, more reliable, and easier to use than other forms of OCR. Barcodes have traditionally been formatted into a series of bars and spaces, although sizes, shapes and types of barcodes have become more complex and specialized as the technology has evolved. Usually the accuracy rate for barcodes is much higher than that of other OCR systems, since barcodes are standardized. Other types of OCR can be hindered by type text that appears in different font sizes and styles.

Barcode types and benefits:

While UPCs are extremely visible to consumers, other types of barcodes are prevalent in the workforce to help organizations improve their business processes. There are more than fifty different types of barcodes, with myriad uses in the business world. Barcodes provide a means of automated capture; as such they can be used to automatically populate information about customers from a database, mechanically index information about documents, eliminate data entry and its unavoidable errors, encode information pertaining to document retention or destruction and much more. Implementation of barcode technology usually results in tremendous ROI across a number of different industries.

Code 128 - (also known as ISBT 128, UCC-128, and EAN-128) is used widely for shipping purposes; it uses the lower 128 ASCII characters, which gives it the ability to encode text, numbers and functions.

Code 3 of 9 - The most common barcode, is also known as Code 39 and LOGMARS. It is ideal for applications that require name badges, identification, tracking, healthcare product labeling and inventory. Like Code 128, Code 39 also supports the lower 128 ASCII characters. Each character is composed of six narrow and three wide bars, and contains four white bars and five black.

Code 2 of 5 - (also known as 2/5) is used primarily in the warehousing and distribution industries, as well as for sorting and airline ticketing. It uses fixed space widths and encodes paired numeric information within its bar widths. A denser version of Code 2/5, known as Interleaved, encodes data in the bars and spaces of the barcodes and can even be printed from an MS Windows program.