The present and future of barcodes is all dependent upon its working, emergence and needs. Today Barcodes can be noticed everywhere from your house to any big multinational organization. Barcodes becomes an essential part of our life. Any small shop or supermarket utilizes barcode technology to smoothly run or manage their multiple operations such as Inventory Control, Production, Product or Item information, Record Keeping, etc. Barcodes always provide exact information about the product.
THE PRESENT AND FUTURE OF BARCODES
By: Digital Deeper
Published: 19/04/2022
The presence of Barcode Technology:
Barcode technology is the most emerging technology in today’s world. Mostly every product in the market is stamped with a barcode sticker or label. Barcode can be of 1D (One Dimensional) or 2D (Two Dimensional) type. Barcodes are reliable in preventing human errors and saving time. Barcode is the first choice for business to enhance their efficiency and reduce unwanted costs.
Industrial Adoption of Barcodes had been made in 1981; the United States Department of Defence adopted the use of Code 39 for marking all products sold to the United States military. After notifying the multiple benefits of barcodes, other industrial areas also adopted them to grow.
Different sectors that adopted barcode:
The Retail sector uses UPC barcodes for identifying the product information without any error. They are used as pricing tags within retail; UPC barcode tracks items within their stores and keeps information such as the price, where it was made, purchase date and time, and what batch of goods they came from. In addition to the unique product number, a UPC barcode includes the manufacturer's information.
For patient verification and protection, Healthcare Industry adopted barcode technology. Barcodes on the armbands of patients help to track medication procedures, improve the admission process and check all information about the patient throughout their presence. Code 128 and Code 39 barcode symbologies are majorly used in the healthcare industry.
At the current time, the barcode technology accelerates the supply chain by providing better opportunities to manage tracking and information gathering.
Benefits of barcodes in the supply chain:
- ➭Tracking and Inventory Management
- ➭Greater Accuracy
- ➭Provide the best process in the supply chain
- ➭Reduce cost
- ➭Better usability over RFID tags
Barcodes are a very useful aspect of the food industry they can encode the information about the product and the recipe which provide the benefits to the people connected to the food industry (consumers of food products and suppliers). Barcodes help the food industry to manage its distribution process. In the food industry barcodes are great for tracking bulk items. Majorly UPC-A barcode technology is used in the food industry. This barcode font type consists of company prefix, product ID, and check digit.
Types of Barcode Fonts mostly used in today’s world:
| Barcode Type | One Dimensional Barcode: | Two Dimensional Barcode: |
| Definition | One Dimensional Barcode is represented in a linear sequence of black and white bars that can be scanned with a computer. 1D barcodes encode product information just as: product number, manufactured date, product size, product type, and so on. |
Two Dimensional Barcodes are represented with multiple square dots. These barcodes can encode up to 7000 characters of data with a wide variety of numeric, alphabets, special characters, and also binary codes. Links for any website can be encoded with them easily. |
| Barcode Fonts | Code39, Code 128, Interleaved 2 of 5, MSI Plessey, USPS, UPC/EAN (UPC-A, UPC-E, EAN-8, and EAN-13) |
Aztec, Data Matrix, MaxiCode, PDF 417, and QR Code |
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Will barcodes vanish in the Future?
Writing the product information by hand is complex work, exhaustive, and error full, whereas barcode technology is so easy and joyful to work with. Barcodes eliminate human errors, time-consuming and recognition errors. Barcode are so simple to print on any product with all information. Barcodes can be scanned with handheld or fixed scanners in any industrial area and a scanner decodes and redirects the information to a computer system within seconds. This ability of barcode technology makes it an emerging aspect of a human being’s life.
Now the QR Codes are trending that encode much more data than a linear barcode. QR Codes are used especially in every sector of the economy. The barcode technology reduces human errors in every industrial or non-industrial area. Having all these speciality barcodes will make a big impact on the whole world in next upcoming years.
More advanced scanning devices are in the development process that will provide the ability to read barcodes from products at any orientation. Image Barcode technology is under the construction and it will help any company increase efficiency. The artificial intelligence that scans images is always developing and evolving. This technology will help to scan product information by scanning the item image only.