The barcode has been in Poland for 20 years! In June 1990, the Institute of Logistics and Warehousing registered the first companies authorized to encode their products with a barcode. 6 of them are still in the system today. From the very beginning, barcodes have been a testament to the high quality of goods and the innovation of the companies introducing them. Currently, over 18,000 enterprises in Poland use these codes, and this number is constantly growing.
However, if one were to ask a statistical Pole what the GS1 standards system is, how it functions, and where one can encounter it in everyday life, the answers could be very different and most often suggest that nothing of the sort exists in Poland. Meanwhile, everyone who has ever happened to shop, for example, in a retail chain store, has seen one of the four pillars of the GS1 system with their own eyes. It is the barcode. The others include: electronic data interchange, EPC/RFID, and global data synchronization (Figure 1). The barcode, however, remains the cheapest and most popular data carrier. Global studies have shown that the use of barcodes provides annual savings of at least 150 billion USD, which reflects almost 6% of the annual sales of the 100 largest retail chains in the world. Barcodes were created with the intention of automating sales at the checkout, but they soon found wide application in production and distribution as well. The code itself does not provide significant benefits to an enterprise unless it is one of the elements of a common business language used by all partners in the supply chain. Such a guarantee is provided by the barcode in the GS1 System – the global language of business.
The GS1 system is a set of international standards aimed at improving the functioning of supply chains regardless of the industry. It should be clearly emphasized that the GS1 system is not an IT solution, but a set of standards for identification and communication. The basis of the GS1 system consists of globally unique numbers used to identify trade and logistics units, locations, assets, and service relations. These numbers can be recorded both in a barcode and a radio tag. Data contained in the code, as well as data related to the identified object, can also be transmitted between partners using electronic commercial messages, eliminating their paper counterparts. Linking a radio tag with the Internet and using standard EPC Global network applications allows for tracking the movement of products in the supply chain.
In order to improve business relations between partners in the supply chain, it is possible to synchronize product data on a global scale, thanks to which all trading partners have consistent data about a specific unit in their systems at the same time. All these possibilities are also already available in Poland for every participant of the GS1 system.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 2/2010.