Top Management Story

Writen by Vaughn Balchunas

Implementing a bar-coding system can be difficult without the care and discipline any serious undertaking requires. That means preparing yourself and your staff for the job at hand and setting aside the time to properly implement the barcode systems that will become an integral part of your overall business information system.

When designing any business process it's always best to start out with a plan that outlines the steps involved. To start, your team needs to develop a list of requirements. Requirements are statements that define the action or result you want the system to do for you.

To find your requirements ask yourself and your staff questions such as:

• What are my bottle necks? (Every business has bottlenecks)
• How long does my raw material sit around?
• How long does inventory sit in the warehouse?
• Is any part of my inventory increasing? If so, why?
• How much time is spent looking for things?
• What don't I know about my business?
• What are my customers biggest complaints
• What departments or processes are consistently slow, inconsistent, or have quality problems?

You get the idea. These kinds of questions will lead to opportunities to improve your business information systems and will help you develop your barcode system requirements which are a critical part of most information systems today.

After you list your requirements you then need to develop 'use cases'. These define the actions that might be taken to accomplish the goal set by the requirement. An example of some use cases might be:

• The receiving clerk scans incoming material into your database system
• The order database is updated so the material order status reflects the receiving of goods
• Labels are printed and made available to receiving

Most likely your barcode equipment requirements and use cases will grow as you work through this important analysis phase. Spending time up front defining exactly what your company needs, who will do it, and how it will be done will save you lots of headaches and money down the road. In all likelihood you have been doing this already with some of your non-technical business processes. So don't be put off because you're dealing with technology.

You or an assigned coordinator need to be directly involved in this process if you expect any kind of real success. Technical expertise is not necessary, though having someone involved that understands the technology will bring you benefits upfront and help you through the process, but the priority must stay on the requirements of the business and not the technology itself.

• Assign someone to be the barcode coordinator.
• Talk to people in your industry that have barcode systems. They will be happy to discuss what they did and you will benefit from their mistakes.
• Learn your industry bar coding standards
• Find out what your suppliers already have in place as far as barcode scanners, printers and systems.