How are Barcodes Used

Barcodes are used in almost every industry

Barcodes are used as a means of quick identification. Nearly every industry uses barcodes to automate and simplify traceability by tracking everything from where something was produced and when it was shipped, to which retailer sold the product, at what time, and for how much. Overall, barcodes provide better accuracy, traceability, and sorting abilities than relying on manually-entered data.

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Safety and liability are also drivers behind industry adoption of barcodes. In recent years, governments around the world have started to require medical devices and pharmaceutical manufacturers to apply machine-readable codes on every package down to individual medicine containers. Should a defective product reach a store shelf, automated tracking of every package will accelerate safety recalls while making quality-control data available to the entire supply chain.