Why isn’t your organization using Barcode Technology?
Barcodes emerged in the 1960’s, primarily in industrial settings, and by the 1970’s they had been standardized and started showing up in more and more commercial applications. Today barcodes are everywhere. They enable quick and precise identification in nearly all types of business. The beauty of the barcode lies in its simplicity, its strength lies in its flexibility.
There are two main reasons why barcoding for inventory applications is beneficial
- Productivity
- Accuracy
With today’s smaller profit margins and competitive markets, inventory control is not an option. Simply put a warehouse must receive inventory and ship items efficiently. If there is a lapse in any of these steps problems are often compounded before they are corrected. Shipping costs, labor spent correcting the problem, additional shipping, customer dissatisfaction are all additional costs that can be avoided through proper inventory management using barcodes. Paper tracking is time consuming, manually entering inventory numbers on paper – often times on many pieces of paper. Scanning a barcode is quick, and can be relayed from one form to another electronically; reducing the administrative time it takes to track the item which will probably be keyed into a database system anyway. Scanning into inventory and moving it through the process of inventory to shipping to invoicing as well as ordering replacement inventory can be automated, saving time and reducing errors. This also allows you to “see” your inventory and know exactly what is where. Barcodes are accurate, much more so than even the most conscientious worker and accuracy is enhanced by positive product identification. Items cannot be misidentified by workers or customers, reducing the risk of inventory shrink and tag swapping. Whenever there is a need to accurately identify or track something, bar-coding should be used.
With today’s low cost units to both print and read barcode labels there is seemingly no reason for businesses to not use the technology. Time savings and increased accuracy, tracking and data sharing capabilities, visible inventory and reduced shrinkage provide a strong case that it can cost businesses for not using it.
If you are interested in seeing how other companies just like yours have been able to implement barcoding solutions utilizing MobileFrame please do not hesitate to contact us today!