The Institute of Logistics and Warehousing (ILiM) –
the GS1 Poland national organization is the only local organization in Poland authorized to admit companies and institutions from Poland into the GS1 system and to assign them GS1 numbers encoded in barcodes, including EAN-8 and EAN-13. These codes are currently placed on virtually every product package sold in retail. The efficiency of automatic identification systems in retail chain stores depends on their quality, which is why continuous monitoring of this quality is essential. A key task of the GS1 Poland national organization is to oversee compliance with international GS1 specifications regarding the correct marking of goods with GS1 barcodes. Consequently, ILiM has been running a barcode quality improvement program for many years.
As part of this program, free quality and accuracy tests of codes are conducted in retail chains, among other activities. The primary goal of these tests is to eliminate codes that are of poor quality, i.e., non-compliant with the PN-ISO/IEC 15420:2006 standard (this standard replaces the PNEN 797+AC:1997 standard) and the “GS1 General Specifications”. The elimination of errors is carried out by checking the quality of GS1 barcodes on packaging present in trade. To this end, Institute staff use devices –
so-called barcode verifiers (Figure 1). Furthermore, the activities carried out under the program aim to identify manufacturers who unlawfully (without an agreement with ILiM) use barcodes with the 590 prefix (these are codes found on Polish goods). This identification is possible through the analysis of product lists of Polish goods sold in retail chains. This prevents, among other things, the phenomenon of unlawful use of other companies’ codes, which can lead to duplicate numbers in retail chains. Many retail chains in Poland already participate in the barcode quality improvement program, striving to eliminate incorrect codes and thereby improve the quality of services provided to their customers. In 2006, the following retail chains participated in this program: “Alma Market”, “E. Leclerc Wrocław”, “Castorama Polska”, “Geant Polska”, and “Społem” PSS Kielce. Any retail chain that applies to ILiM can join the program. Chains participating in this program receive reports from the tests conducted within them. As part of the barcode quality improvement program, approximately 90% of the codes whose quality was questioned in retail chains have been corrected. This contributes to reducing customer service time at the checkout. As a result, queues at checkouts are reduced, as are time losses caused by the need for manual entry of product numbers. As a result of research conducted over the last two years by the Institute of Logistics and Warehousing, it was determined that the problem of complete failure of barcode readers to scan codes due to poor quality affects over 2% of codes found on product packaging sold in retail. Based on the aforementioned research, it was calculated that time losses due to this amount to an average of approximately 4.1% in retail chains in Poland. At first glance, this seems small, but on the scale of an entire retail chain, it is a significant value. For example, with 100,000 man-hours, time losses amount to 4,100 hours. It is enough to multiply this last number by the value of a man-hour to determine these losses in PLN. And yet, losses due to poor code quality are incurred not only in retail chain stores. They affect the entire supply chain where automatic product identification is used.
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