You browse the aisles of the grocery store tossing items into your
cart left and right. Oh! You stop dead in your tracks. Your favorite
pasta sauce (which you've been craving) is in stock. You grab the jar;
cruise through the checkout and out the door with bags in tow. Within a
half hour you'll be devouring the gourmet creation you dreamed up for
dinner.
Do you know what just made your shopping experience a whole lot
faster and easier?
Barcodes.
Most of us rarely realize how bar coding not only saves us time at
the store (Hello?! Can you imagine the agony of waiting for a cashier to
manually enter each individual SKU number for your entire purchase?)
but also the benefit bar codes could provide to businesses.
Did you know?
- Bar coding is the most common automatic identification technology
that provides timely, error-free information.
- Bar codes accurately verify business transactions and increase
productivity.
- Slide spool assembly into cradle on top cover.
- Studies have shown that a data entry specialist will make one
error for every 300 characters manually entered.
Code's Anatomy
Just as a swipe of a jar of tomato sauce across a scanner at the
grocery store provides relevant information for a sale, bar codes
similarly provide a method of encoding text information that can be read
by electronic scanners in other applications. But the squares of black
and white lines and numbers that appear on just about every product at a
retailer only accounts for about 30 percent of uses. To understand this
better, lets explore how bar codes work and what can bar coding can do
for your business.
Each code is made up of a series of adjacent parallel black and white
bars with differing widths spaced apart creating a pattern. The pattern
of bars and spaces represent characters of the alphabet or numbers and
the overall pattern is called a symbology. It represents a machine
readable format of information.
Like with our pasta sauce, the bar code contains characters that are
unique to a product and identify the manufacturer and product. To ensure
proper decoding, each sequence of characters has a start character
(system character) and a stop character or check character/digit and is
used to signal the scanner when to start and end the data input.
Accuracy and validation is ensured through the check character which is
typically determined by a calculation. The smaller or more dense the bar
code is, the more vital a role the stop and check characters play. When
scanned, the light of the scanner is reflected off of the black and
white bars to produce a wave pattern signaling highs and lows. When
converted to a digital format on/off patters the information decoded can
be interpreted by a computer and the information then used.
Want to learn more? See the full information page on our website.
