The Institute of Logistics and Warehousing manages the GS1 system in our country as part of the international GS1 organization and is therefore obliged, among other things, to supervise compliance with international rules for marking goods with GS1 barcodes.
In connection with this, as in previous years, it launched a barcode quality improvement program in 2005. As part of this program, studies were conducted in retail chains that expressed a willingness to cooperate with the ILiM. The primary objective of these studies was to eliminate incorrect codes, i.e., those not produced in accordance with the PN-EN 797+AC: 1997 standard and the “GS1 General Specifications,” by checking the quality status of barcodes on packaging in trade, as well as identifying manufacturers illegally (without an agreement with the ILiM) using GTIN-8 and GTIN-13 numbers with the 590 prefix, through the analysis of product databases obtained from retail chains.
In 2005, 5 retail chains participated in the barcode quality improvement program.
These were:
– “Castorama Polska” Sp. z o.o.,
– “Jeronimo Martins Dystrybucja” Sp. z o.o.,
– “Makro Cash and Carry Polska” SA,
– Powszechna Spółdzielnia Spożywców SPOŁEM in Katowice,
– “BERTI” Sp. z o.o.
In supermarkets selected by the retail chains, ILiM employees examined the quality of selected barcodes. Incorrect barcodes on items were identified both by retail unit staff (checkout operators and personnel entering goods into the store’s IT system) where the codes were examined, and by ILiM employees routinely checking product groups most prone to barcode errors (e.g., frozen foods, dairy products, weighed goods: meat, cheese, packaged bulk items).
Through ILiM interventions with manufacturers of incorrectly coded items, approximately 90% of the codes whose quality was questioned were corrected. Barcodes were also sent by GS1 system participants directly to the ILiM for quality testing. As a result, approximately 950 barcodes were examined at the Institute in 2005, and quality opinions were sent to the companies accordingly. All these tests were performed by the ILiM free of charge.
A comparison of the frequency of occurrence of individual types of errors shows that the most common errors in the barcodes checked in 2005 are (in order of frequency):
– errors in bar/space thickness,
– code bars too low,
– code magnification factor less than 0.80,
– margin too small (most often the right margin),
– contrast too low, which is associated with incorrect background color and/or code bars,
– light spots (under-printing) on the code bars,
– incorrect code location.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka”, No. 3/2006.