As part of the “Quality Improvement Program – Cooperation with Retail Chains,” employees of the Institute of Logistics and Warehousing conducted measurements of time losses in 2005 caused by the necessity for cashiers to manually enter product GTINs (the product GTIN is encoded in the bars of EAN-8 and EAN-13 codes).
These studies were carried out in supermarkets of two chains. During the process, 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 entry, i.e., using a keyboard, of product GTINs during each transaction,
– total number of products in each transaction,
– number of products in each transaction whose GTIN 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 GTINs,
– total number of products,
– number of products whose GTIN was entered manually,
– average time to sell one product whose GTIN was entered automatically, i.e., using a barcode scanner,
– average time to sell one product whose GTIN was entered manually.
Table 1 presents examples of the results of such measurements and the calculations based on them. In the case of similar studies conducted in 2003, the measurements included manual entry of a product GTIN when the scanner could not read the code, as well as manual entry of a product number for items without a code, such as bread, fruit, and 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 rate 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’ GTINs takes up 7.47% of the cashiers’ total working time for retail chain A and 6.02% for retail chain B. Furthermore, the results of the calculations indicate that time losses caused by the necessity to manually enter a product number whose barcode could not be read by the 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 required for automatic entry of these numbers must be subtracted from the time spent on manual GTIN entry).
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” No. 3/2006.