Lesson 8 - Bar coding improves accuracy.

     You can spend a lot of time arranging products in your truck or shop to maximize the productivity of your people but how can you prevent inaccuracies of your people writing indecipherable descriptions, mixed up product numbers and becoming drowned in paperwork? The answer is bar coding. You might think it would be impossible to put a barcode label on every piece of every item you stock. You don’t have to. Many companies utilize the power of bar codes by placing these labels on bin locations instead of individual products. Time savings by having the minimum and maximum quantities plus the item description and a recommended purchase quantity for that particular item at your finger tips while you’re at the bin location will pay for the cost of the barcode scanner and labels in a very short time and provide you a quick and easy solution when the usage for that item inevitably changes. Many of the more progressive suppliers today have bar coded inventory control programs that are much more inexpensive then you might imagine.

     Look around any international airport today at the signage and you will find that instead of using words on signs, there are pictures. For example, there is not sign a showing the word “EXIT”, there is a picture of a person walking through a door. Why is this? Because we don’t all speak the same language. As you probably already know, even inside the trade, one service tech may call a fitting a “nipple” another a “pipe extender” and worse yet another might be in a “fog” and the words not come to his mind. Like the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

     Although having bin labels and product labels with a synchronized numbering system is better than nothing, many of the most successful companies realize the edge an illustration can provide in saving time and aggravation. So why not go the extra step in making sure that each of your bin locations and product labels have a picture of what is enclosed?