Universal Product Code
Last year on a camping trip Lisa Warden and her
daughter Jessica stopped for
groceries in an extremely small town. While
shopping, Jessica kept hearing an
unfamiliar noise and asked what it was, but
Lisa was not sure what she was
talking about. Because Lisa remembers the cash
register age she did not realize
Jessica had never heard one actually
working in a store. When they were in the
check out line Jessica pointed at
the old cash register and told her mom that is
the noise she has been
hearing. Lisa laughed and tried to explain that at one
time all stores had
cash registers like this one. Jessica was born in the
computer age and could
not comprehend the thought of cashiers and baggers doing
so much work. Before
bar codes, cashiers had to look at each price tag and
manually key enter the
dollar amount. This made the consumer have to wait in
long check out lines,
which did not make for a pleasant experience. Because the
cashier was busy
entering each item’s price, he or she did not have time to
bag the
merchandise. The retailer had to hire another person to put the products
into
bags, and this increased the prices. Ed Leibowitz reported that
supermarket’s
net margins were one percent in the more profitable times, but
down six
percent by 1970 (130). Their inventory control did not help their net
margins
because of the considerable time it took and their employee wages they
paid.
Consumers, retailers, and producers have benefited with the invention of
the
bar code by saving time and money. The bar code is a series of
thirteen
numbers written in a coded form of black and white lines that a
scanner can
read. The definition according to The Computer Desktop
Encyclopedia is, The
printed code used for recognition by a bar code reader
(scanner). Traditional
one-dimensional bar codes use the bar’s width as the
code, but encode just an
ID or account number. Two-dimensional bar codes,
such as PDF417 from Symbol
Technology, are read horizontally and
vertically. PDF417 holds 1,800 characters
in an area the size of a postage
stamp (Freedman 62). The Universal Product Code
(UPC) is thirteen numbers
divided into three sections: the first five digits are
the manufacturer’s
code, the next seven digits are the product’s code, and
the last digit is a
check digit (Hartston). The bar code currently being used is
one-dimensional,
but the appetite for including more and more detail in bar code
messages
seems to have no limit. An item’s label has limited space, and
because of
this, stacked bar codes, better known as two-dimensional bar codes
have been
developed. Explained in Using Bar Code--Why it’s Taking Over, A
symbology
called Code 49, the first stacked bar code to receive widespread
interest,
was introduced by Intermec Corporation in 1987. The following
year
Laserlight Systems, Inc. introduced Code 16K as an entry in the
symbology
category. Since then, several additional stacked symbologies have
been
introduced. The stacked symbology of Code 16K is designed to contain
from 2 to
16 rows of bars. Each row has a row designator (in UPC
symbology) on each end of
the row, and five message characters between them
in Code 128 format. This gives
Code 16K a message capacity of 77 full
ASCII characters, or 154 numeric
characters, within a very small label
(Collins 38). Two-dimensional bar codes
are not yet in the mainstream of bar
code technology. They do represent the
direction in which the technology is
headed. Railroad cars used bar codes in the
1960’s to track each car to
provide accounting reports for freight car rental.
Bar codes were first
patented in 1949, but it was retail that bar coding made
its mark (Gowrie).
Retail bar coding first appeared on a pack of gum at a Marsh
Supermarket
in Troy, Ohio, on June 26, 1974 (Glanz 9). "Bar code scanning is
probably the
single most revolutionary thing that has happened in retail sales
in 50
years," says George Goldberg, founder and former publisher of SCAN,
an
industry newsletter (qtd. in Gowrie). Norman Joseph Woodland and
Bernard
"Bob" Silver, mechanical engineering instructors at
Philadelphia’s Drexel
Institute of Technology, overheard a supermarket
executive trying to sell the
Drexel dean on a research project to
automate the checkout counter. The dean
declined, but Woodland and Silver
began pursuing the research on their own.
Woodland left Drexel but could
not stop thinking about the concept. He first
thought of a code, and the only
code he knew was Morse. Sitting on Miami Beach
thinking of dots and dashes,
he reached into the sand and drug his hand. He
looked at the different size
lines each finger made, and the bar code image hit
him. Silver designed an
electronic decoder for the scanning device Woodland
created. Woodland then
took a job at IBM, hoping he could interest the company
in developing his
invention (Leibowitz 130). Without the concept of a bar code,
the busy world
of retail would be a slower place. It is unbelievable how his
persistence
would effect the world. This is how the bar code and scanner work
according
to Chuck Haga, The heart of the scanner is a laser about the size of a
pencil
eraser. It shoots a beam of light that passes through a lens and strikes
a
mirror mounted on a spinner working at 6,000 - 8,000 revolutions per
minute.
The laser beam is swept in a circle and bounced off more mirrors,
producing more
than 2,000 scan lines a second, each zapping the label at a
different angle. As
the laser beam hits the bar code, it sees white spaces
and black bars. The beam
bounces back, and the scanner collects, measures and
decodes the patterns of
reflected light. It comes up with a series of
numbers, a sort of product license
plate, which shoots into the store’s
database to find the price. At the same
time, the transaction may adjust the
store’s inventory records and even
trigger replacement orders--all in less
time than it takes to ask "paper or
plastic?" (1A). Most users of bar codes
rely on both speed and accuracy to
improve their operations. In the beginning
consumers were leery of the accuracy
of the bar code; Carol Tucker Foreman,
therefore, started an anti-bar-code
crusade. She was on Phil Donahue’s talk
show and asked his viewers to send
money to the Consumer Federation, and they
would use the money to stop the use
of bar codes, revealed in Smithsonian
(Leibowitz 130). The crusade did not like
the idea of their products lacking
a price tag and feared the stores would over
charge them. Emphasized in
Discount Store News, price checks at 1,033 stores in
thirty-six states found
that, on average, twenty-nine out of every thirty items
tested scanned prices
accurately, proving crusaders’ fears were unfounded
(Rankin 14). In the
retail business, the bar code has shortened the check out
lines, making the
consumer’s shopping trip a happier adventure. The cashier is
more cheerful
with the customer because he or she does not have to concentrate
on the price
of each item. The customer’s most bought items will always be on
the shelves
because of the efficiency of the bar code updating the daily
inventory.
"Every night the exact number of grocery items sold that day is
replaced by
the distribution center, and the store’s shelves can be
replenished the next
morning" (Collins 13). Because this process is so exact,
marketing products
has improved, satisfying the customer and increasing the
merchant's profits.
Used in all types of businesses the bar code is a very
helpful tool. United
Parcel Service started using them to help keep track of
their customer’s air
packages. When a person or a company sends a package they
want to know where
that package is at all times, especially if they send it with
a more
expensive service such as next day air or second day air. To satisfy
their
customer's needs, United Parcel Service decided in 1989 to start using a
bar
code on their next day and second day air labels. At first the
scanned
information was only available to United Parcel Service employees,
but the
customer could call and find where their package was. Two years later
United
Parcel Service created their own web site. If a customer needed to
know where
their package was all they needed to do was to log on to the web
site and key in
the tracking number from their package’s label. Larry
Pontinus offered, that
if United Parcel Service would have known the
importance of the bar code they
would have demanded their customers use them
on every package shipped. This is
were the company would like to be by
September 1, 2000, and have three
facilities already testing "smart
packages". The facilities use less man
power and more technology to
distribute a package from point A to point B. A
smart package is a package
that has a bar code on its label and the United
Parcel Service hub’s
scanners are able to read them and then sort the package
accordingly, claimed
Hub 2000 PSG Manager, Mark Casseday (Video). If the
received package does not
have a bar coded label, there are employees who enter
the label’s information
into a computer and the computer creates a bar code
label. This new label is
machine and human readable. After the label is affixed
to the package it is
reentered into the system. After reading the package’s
label, the system uses
an arm on the conveyor belt to push the package to the
conveyor belt that
goes to the truck for delivery, disclosed Operations Planning
Manager,
Greg Campbell (Video). The system reads the smart label to fasten a
presort
label. This presort label tells the employee where to load the package
onto
the truck. The system takes all the information into account: the weight,
the
destination and the truck’s route before issuing it a spot on the
truck.
Each spot on the truck has a color and a number. If it is a heavy
package it has
to be on the floor of the truck. If it is going to a place
that is one of the
driver’s first stops then it has to be in the back of the
truck. Each label
has a color and a number as well as the truck and the
person loading the truck
knows immediately where the package belongs, assured
Package Project Manager, Al
Chavez (Video). The presort labels will help
tremendously with vacation
coverage. United Parcel Service will not have to
have highly trained employees
for the vacation replacement, theorized Package
Project Manager, John Olsen
(Video). The money spent to utilize this
technology is nothing compared to the
money it will eventually save. Another
service industry using the bar code is
the health care industry. Joseph
Shapiro reports that a new survey from the
Institute of Medicine
estimates that 44,000 to 98,000 Americans a year die from
preventable
mistakes made in hospitals by physicians, pharmacists, and other
health care
professionals. Hospital errors rank as the nation’s eighth most
frequent
killer. More than 7,000 Americans die because of drug mix-ups (60).
These
mistakes obviously need correcting. Bar coding is helping hospitals
and
doctors as explained in U.S. News and World Report, The VA hospitals are
making
clever use of bar-coding technology to avoid medication bungles.
Prescriptions
are typed into computers, not handwritten. And bar-coded
labels, attached to a
patient’s wrist and a nurse’s charts, are scanned each
time a patient gets a
pill, to check against mistakes. The idea came from a
nurse at the Topeka VA
hospital who, returning a rental car one day, noticed
the wireless scanner used
to check in her car. The system will be in place in
every VA hospital by June
(Shapiro 60). Julekha Dash estimates that using
handheld devices and bar code
scanning technology could reduce errors in
administering medication by as much
as 85 percent (1). Robot-RX is a
centralized system that automatically dispenses
bar coded medications to
drawers designated for each patient. In the five years
of using Robot-RX no
drug delivery errors have occurred. Unfortunately, drug
manufacturers have
several bar code formats, which makes it hard to implement
handheld readers
that track which care giver gave what drug (Dash 1). Explained
in
Computerworld, Tom Smith, administrative director for pharmacy and
oncology
at Moore Regional Hospital in Pinehurst, N.C., said he hopes drug
manufacturers
will soon adopt a standard bar code on their drug label. "I
think with the
national initiative, the [Food and Drug Administration] is
going to mandate that
[all] drugs will have to conform to a universal bar
code," Smith said.
"Until that happens, [drug manufacturers] won’t do
it." (qtd. in Dash 1)
Let us all hope the Food and Drug Administration
does mandate this and soon. As
mentioned before, there were zero errors with
the installation of bar coded
label on medication. The universal bar coding
of medical products and the use of
scanners to analyze reams of data is
inevitable. Announced in Journal of Health
Care Finance, As managed care
drives providers to reduce inventories, better
understand utilization rates,
and reduce costs, it will generate new databases
out of necessity. One of
these databases, and the focus of this article, will be
generated from
electronic scanners that will scan or read bar code from the
myriad of
packaged products any provider will utilize (e.g., gauze pads,
aspirins, foam
pads, disposables of all kinds, etc.). This new database will not
be
developed to improve clinical pathways, neural networks, or care
paths,
although these can hopefully be integrated at a later date.
The
provider-generated database, as in the case of supermarket scanner data,
will
revolutionize inventory management, allow precise utilization to be
measured,
and allow health care and medical products manufacturers to know
their market
shares and the effectiveness of promotions (Fox 44). The
installation of this
database should help reduce a patient’s hospital bill,
because there will be
an accurate inventory control and no excess medical
products. There is a
software program that works with a bar code scanner to
read aloud descriptions
of tens of thousands of items for blind people.
Bragged in The Associated Press,
SCANACAN was developed by a Manchester,
S.D., couple whose Ferguson Enterprises
develops products to assist the
blind. To use the program, a scanner reads the
bar code and a synthesized
voice provides information the user requests--a
simple description of the
product or, in the case of food, how to prepare it.
The program allows
users to create more databases and will hold up to 2 billion
bar codes,
though that number may be limited by the memory available on the
computer.
SCANACAN also can benefit newly blind people who are not fluent
in
Braille or people whose fingers have lost the sensitivity needed to
read
Braille. For now, customers must manually enter descriptions of
products whose
codes are not already in the program. But the Fergusons are
seeking databases
from more manufacturers to expand the software’s usefulness
(Barrett 1D). This
bar code program has made a world of difference in the
blind’s accessibility.
It can be used for their clothes by sewing on a
bar code and entering a
description, including its color. Then when it is
time to get dressed they will
not mix plaids and paisleys. It also helps keep
track of their food inventory.
Blind people tell the computer there is
one less of a particular item after they
use it all. Then when it is time to
make a grocery list they do not have to
remember what they used throughout
the week. No longer needed are the manual
cash registers of yesteryear. Bar
codes have revolutionized businesses with
better inventory control and
helping satisfy their customers needs. Twenty-five
years of using bar codes
in the retail industry has only improved with age. It
has moved on to bigger
and better objectives, along with staying where it
originated. It is hard to
believe such a small thing--in size--could change the
world in such immense
ways.
Bibliography
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