Bar coding - still one of the leading choices among retailers

In today's competitive market, enhancing the speed of your operation is a must. To do that, you need to keep up with the pace of change in technology. But the wide-ranging selection of products can be mind-boggling even to the most technology-oriented retailers.

Bar code is the predominant auto-ID technology used to collect data about any person, place or thing. This is important to retailers who need to build their database of customers, especially when implementing customer-loyalty programmers.

The more common uses for barcode include inventory control, personal identification, warehousing and point-of-sale operations. Used across the board in a business, it increases accuracy and productivity, resulting in cost savings and overall efficiency. It should be noted that bar code is not a system itself. In stead, this technology is an effective identification tool providing accurate and timely collected data when used simultaneously with other complementary sophisticated management system.

Barcode are essentially a pattern of varying-width light and dark elements (typically bars which represent numbers, letters or punctuation symbols.

The latest barcode technology, two dimensional (2D) symbologies, touted to be the next step in barcode evolution, is catching on. These symbologies fit much more data than conventional linear bar codes in to less space, offering a much higher level of data integrity.

Due to the all-importance of accuracy in first-time scanning as well as to match the advancement in bar coding various scanners are available in the market from renowned solutions providers. Each type of scanner provides its own benefits to retailers, depending on the company's needs and objectives. But to gain the most from barcode system, the scanner should match software application used. (Retail Asia 5/2000)