Almost every industry all across the globe is reliant on barcode numbering of inventory and it has become an integral part thereby replacing the method of manual entry effectively. The usage of barcodes has become inevitable due to its accuracy, speed and reliability. As a matter of fact, barcoding is now a vital cog for any automation process which has successfully replaced the traditional method of data entry. This has enabled the automatic identification and collection of data which is termed as Auto ID or AIDC (Automatic Identification and Data Collection). There are quite a few things to be known about barcode and it working.
At a glance, the barcode appears to be a visual pattern of numbers and parallel lines of different width readable by a machine. Barcodes are used to recognize a particular product that procures the data requirements of any system. They are very similar to each other in appearance as they look alike and they are linear. They are made of white and black parallel lines which are evenly spaced and of varying width. These are 1D codes.A more advanced barcode known as the 2d or matrix code are made up of two dimensional shapes and patterns.
There can be a host of advantages and disadvantages for using barcodes. Following are its advantages:
- 2-D barcodes can easily store a large amount of data.
- It also gives the flexibility to store a wide data range that can be embedded into 2-D barcodes such as numeric, binary, text and unicode data.
- Due to the encasement of error correction of 2-D barcodes, one can retrieve data even if it is damaged up to 20%.
Similarly there are few disadvantages as well which include:
- In case there is a large of data to be stored, the length of the barcode has to be increased.
- Damaged linear barcodes cannot be scanned with accuracy.
- To scan the linear barcode, there needs to be optical line of sight.
- Barcodes can never be scanned without scanning device.
- Barcodes like the 2-D barcodes run on complex algorithms meaning they are more complicated than 1-D barcodes.
Nevertheless, the barcodes are of huge significance for inventory management thereby reducing manual data entry errors and processing time. Over the period of time, barcodes have become extremely reliable form for inventory tracking.
