The ability to carry the complete information about a product makes barcodes very essential in businesses. Identifying many types of ingredients and components is necessary in manufacturing process, the inventory for finished goods and in shipping packages as well.
Multiple advantages of barcodes in supply chain and materials management, and production control made barcodes and barcodes labels usage compulsory. 2D barcodes can store more information in smaller places. This information is read by barcode scanners. It is very useful in security and sensitive industries like aerospace and defense, where traceability of all parts and components is necessary because of security issues. There are different stages of manufacturing, in which barcodes are used, such as:
Barcodes are used on the raw material packages before sending them to manufacturing unit. When they enter the manufacturing location, barcodes make them easy to identify the raw materials. Then materials are moved to inventory location.
They move the materials packages to the inventory location and they link them with the barcode labels of the shelves. Raw material are taken from inventory shelves to the factory floor, then again they are scanned and they update them at production level.
First, parts and their quantities are verified from their barcode labels and brought to the factory to be used in the production as the part of the assembly. Later a new barcode is generated, after taking them to assemble stage. Later new product which is produced newly is identified by that new label.
Later individual products are barcoded. Again they are barcoded after packing the products in a bigger container or carton as they will be sent to different locations, so that they can be tracked at every stage till they reach the shop floor.
Later when they sell the goods, they scan the barcodes of the products in shops by using barcode scanner to know information about product. Symbol barcode scanners can be used for this purpose.