Is there life in the old barcode?

Posted on 12 August 2010

The humble barcode is approaching its 40^th birthday, but are newer technologies about to steal its market, or is it still an unbeatable machine readable solution for data capture?

First, a quick history lesson to set the scene:

In the UK, Plessey were the first to implement a barcode as a mechanism of presenting a unique number in a form which could be ‘read’ by machines in the early 1970s. This barcode was imaginatively called the “Plessey code” and represented numeric data as dark bars printed on a white background, very similar to the barcode we all see today on retail products. The first retail barcode was the applied to a multipack of Wrigley’s Gum in June of 1974 and was the forerunner of what is now the Universal Product Code from the USA. If the history of these things interests you, I recommend you have a look at this.

Today, there are over 40 different symbologies or types of barcode, each with its own specialist application or market. You can now barcode alpha and numeric characters, or if you use Code 128, all 128 printable ASCII characters can be encoded. What makes the humble barcode a highly utilised technology is the cost, it can be printed for next to nothing and these days the laser or CCD based barcode scanners which read them are very inexpensive. Imagine your company produces tins of baked beans. You print a two-colour label to keep the costs down and add your GS1 allocated barcode. By adding a barcode to your finished product you will increase your costs by fractions of a penny, only a small amount of printing ink, virtually nothing. In the last thirty years I’ve been asked many times what technology will replace the barcode and as you can see my answer centres on cost. Until a technology is invented or developed which can be applied to all fast moving consumer goods at a lower cost than barcodes or offering significant benefits, it won’t be replaced.

In this blog I’ve written of applications from Event Management to Warehouse Control, Voting Systems to Asset Management, all of which have utilised the barcode because it provides the lowest possible cost of application. There are less price sensitive applications for example; issuing machine tools in an aircraft factory, which could benefit from technology that unlike barcodes doesn’t require line of sight and provides a mechanism to write information to it. This technology is radio frequency identification (RFID) and is considerably more expensive to apply and read.

Today your car has hundreds of barcode labels identifying its various components, your courier supplied package is traceable because of its unique barcoded consignment number. The cutting instrument wielded by the surgeon in the hospital operating theatre is likely to have a laser etched, two dimensional barcode uniquely identifying it as his favourite scalpel. In many walks of life the barcode has become ubiquitous, as a technology for entering data automatically into computer systems, it’s achieved an enviable, even unassailable market share.

It also achieved something remarkable, long before any other technology, barcodes or more correctly the commercial influencers behind them, set international standards which allow a multipack of Wrigley’s Gum to be correctly recognised by an EPoS system anywhere in the world.

Whilst RFID remains the most talked about and least deployed technology due to the implementation costs, there is most certainly life in the barcode. I’m no gambler but even I’d wager that the mighty barcode will reach a century!