What is an advantage of using barcodes?

Imagine having to keep track of everything by hand whether that be inventory, shipping items, WIP items, and anything else that needs to be documented by suppliers and manufacturers. To put it simply, this wastes the time of the employees and increases the time it takes to get products to a customer. The inefficiencies of manual documentation can be thrown aside with the help of barcoding. Utilizing barcodes offers businesses a wide array of benefits revolving around inventory management practices:

• Barcoding is efficient – A quick scan gives the employee and the computer system attached to the scanner all the relevant information they need regarding the scanned product. This is much faster than manually typing out the serial number and looking for stored information.
• It is cost effective and versatile – Barcode labels cost mere cents per label when companies have the ability to make them with an in-house industrial label printer. With that being said, the improvements that a barcode system offers to a business is well worth the amount of money needed to make it happen. These labels can also be used for a number of different applications and have several different label material options available.
• Utilizing barcodes reduces errors and provides better data – Manually typing or writing out serial numbers is cumbersome and has an extremely high error rate compared to scanning barcode labels. The user also will not have to look for data in other places around the work area as all of the necessary information will be contained in that single barcode.
• It improves inventory control – Inventory control is everything when thinking about barcoding systems. Having the right amount of material at the right time for consumers is of the utmost importance in running a warehouse, distribution center, hospital, or any other business that relies on the constant supply of product to keep the process flow moving at a steady rate. Without barcodes there is more likely to be downtimes and bottlenecks that form due to the lack of inventory accuracy.
• Barcoding allows for improved decision making – If the inventory is precise, the employees and managers will be able to focus their efforts on making decisions such as when to buy more product to keep everything running smoothly, but not overbuying to take up valuable rack space and waste money.

Overall, the use of barcodes provides some massive improvements to a once manually operating workforce. Speed and flow are everything in creating an efficient workplace and that is exactly what barcodes provide to businesses.