The Institute of Logistics and Warehousing (ILiM) – the national GS1 organization, GS1 Poland, is the only local organization in our country authorized to admit companies and institutions from Poland into the GS1 system and to assign them GS1 numbers encoded in GS1 barcodes, including EAN-8 and EAN-13. One of the key tasks of the national GS1 Poland organization is to supervise compliance with international GS1 specifications regarding the correct marking of goods with GS1 barcodes. Consequently, for many years, ILiM has been running a barcode quality improvement program and cooperating with retail chains in this regard. As part of this program, quality and accuracy tests of codes are conducted in retail chains, as well as quality tests of codes sent to ILiM for verification. The primary goal of these studies is to eliminate codes that are incorrect in terms of quality, and thus inconsistent with the PN-ISO/IEC 15420:2007 standard.
In addition to testing barcode quality, as part of this program, ILiM employees have also spent several years studying time losses caused by the need for cashiers to manually enter the GTIN of a product whose barcode could not be read by a scanner. It was found that approximately 2% of codes are not read, and the resulting time loss averages 4.13%. In other words, figuratively speaking, 1 in 24 cashiers is employed due to unreadable codes and the necessity of manually entering the numbers encoded in them into the cash register system. And that is not all: many codes, seemingly read by barcode scanners without major problems, do not comply with the requirements of standards and the “GS1 General Specifications.” In the case of such codes, scanners often have to make multiple attempts to read them, which extends the scanning time, and thus the product sales time. We therefore have further time losses. Retail chains in Poland are focusing more and more attention on the above problems, which are, after all, associated with specific financial losses. The shortage of labor in retail is also not without significance. Eliminating errors from barcodes and printing codes that comply with the requirements of standards and the “GS1 General Specifications” is becoming a goal for many retail chains. They achieve this, among other things, through cooperation with ILiM, checking the readability of codes on products accepted into their distribution centers, and testing the reading time of codes by scanners at points of sale (POS). Cooperation between a retail chain and ILiM can take various forms. For example, ILiM employees checking the quality of codes that are not read by checkout scanners in a hypermarket designated by the retail chain, or sending lists of unreadable barcodes to ILiM. The Institute sends an intervention letter to each supplier of a product with an incorrect code, demanding an improvement in code quality – the entire code correction process is supervised, and its final result is a barcode of correct quality. Many chains verify barcodes, for example, at the entrance to their distribution centers. In the event that a code receives a negative quality assessment, the chains demand that the product supplier correct the code. Information related to this is sent to the Institute by chains cooperating with ILiM on the code quality improvement program. In this case, the effectiveness of improving code quality is greater, as the supplier is “pressured” to improve the quality of their codes from two sides: from the recipient of their products, i.e., the retail chain, and from the institution that supervises compliance with GS1 goods marking rules – i.e., ILiM. In the absence of a reaction from the supplier, and thus failure to correct errors in the codes, they may face the loss of many recipients of their products. Retail chains will easily find new suppliers who produce similar goods with correct barcodes. Some retail chains go further in terms of supervising the correctness of barcodes: they not only intervene in the case of unreadable codes but also study the reading times of codes by scanners. In cases where the reading time of a given barcode is significantly longer than the average reading time of codes, they demand that the supplier correct the barcodes, and above all, execute them in accordance with the requirements of standards and the “GS1 General Specifications.” The primary cause of extended reading time, or essentially multiple attempts to read a code by barcode scanners, is the execution of codes inconsistent with the requirements of the PN-ISO/IEC 15420:2007 standard (in the case of EAN-8 and EAN-13 codes) and the requirements of the “GS1 General Specifications.” This is related to the trend of minimizing the space occupied by the barcode, which is considered by many graphic designers of packaging to be an element that spoils the aesthetics of the packaging. People placing the code on packaging very often do not know the structure of the EAN-8 or EAN-13 code and the requirements related to its printing. Yet, information on this subject is publicly available; one only needs to read Chapter 5 of the “GS1 General Specifications” found on the website.