Facilitating shop-floor bar-coding implementation: A do-it-yourself approach for small firms

• Published in: Production and inventory management journal Vol. 33; no. 4; pp. 1 - 5
• Main Authors: Gurney, Brian, Discenza, Richard
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Alexandria American Production & Inventory Control Society, Inc 1992
• Subjects: Automatic identification; Bar codes; Computer peripherals; Corporate objectives; Guidelines; Identification systems; Implementations; Information systems; Inventory; Inventory control; Manufacturing; Process planning; Product design; Small business; Software; Systems development
• ISSN: 0897-8336

The successful design and implementation of automatic identification technologies, in particular, bar coding, will be one of the cornerstones of being a competitive manufacturer in the 1990s. It has been reported that bar-code scanning systems are 75% faster than entering information by typing and 33% faster than entering information on a 10-key entry board. The accuracy level for 1.25 million lines of bar code was 99.997% correct, compared to data-entry operators who achieved an accuracy rating of 98.2%. Bar-code technology has been successfully applied in many areas within the manufacturing discipline, including time-labor tracking, work in process, inventory control, and quality assurance. The benefits of bar coding extend beyond the factory floor to include customer service, production scheduling, and numerous applications in the distribution function. A framework is presented for successfully implementing an automatic identification system to provide maximum benefit to an organization.