As part of the “Quality Improvement Program – Cooperation with Retail Chains,” employees of the Institute of Logistics and Warehousing conducted measurements in 2005 of time losses caused by the necessity for cashiers to manually enter product GTIN numbers (the product GTIN number is encoded in the bars of EAN-8 and EAN-13 codes).
These studies were carried out in supermarkets of two chains. During the studies, the following data were recorded in result tables:
– duration of each transaction, i.e., the time taken to sell all items for one customer,
– total duration of manual, i.e., keyboard-based, entry of product GTIN numbers during each transaction,
– total number of products in each transaction,
– number of products in each transaction whose GTIN number was entered manually.
The obtained measurement results were entered into an EXCEL spreadsheet at the ILiW, where the following calculations were also performed for all transactions:
– total duration of all transactions,
– time spent on manual entry of GTIN numbers,
– total number of products,
– number of products whose GTIN number was entered manually,
– average time to sell one product whose GTIN number was entered automatically, i.e., using a barcode scanner,
– average time to sell one product whose GTIN number was entered manually.
Table 1 presents examples of such measurement results and the calculations based on them. In the case of similar studies conducted in 2003, the measurements included the manual entry of a product GTIN number whose code could not be read by the scanner, as well as the manual entry of a product number that did not have a code, e.g., bread, fruit, vegetables. The results of these measurements were presented in the magazine “Logistyka” No. 4/2004. However, in the case of the studies conducted in 2005, measurements of time losses were made only for those caused by poor barcode quality. The intention was to compare the obtained results with the 2% non-readable code value reported by GS1 Australia and GS1 New Zealand.
A summary of the measurement results and calculations for individual supermarkets is presented in Table 2 and in graphical form in Figures 1 and 2.
The measurements show that during the studies, 3.5% of codes were not read in the store belonging to retail chain A (general construction industry), and 2.2% in the store belonging to retail chain B (food and industrial industry). Meanwhile, the manual entry of these products’ GTIN numbers takes cashiers 7.47% of their total working time for retail chain A and 6.02% for retail chain B, respectively. In turn, the results of the calculations indicate that time losses caused by the necessity of manually entering a product number whose barcode could not be read by a barcode scanner amount to 4.1% for retail chain A and 3.9% for retail chain B (to calculate time losses, the time that would have been needed for automatic entry of these numbers must be subtracted from the time spent on manual entry of GTIN numbers).
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” No. 3/2006.