The barcode was one the most significant innovations of the 20 th century. It helped improve efficiency in practically every sphere of life. The cheap online shopping, low-cost airlines, affordable courier services, streamlined manufacturing and efficient healthcare that the world takes for granted today, wouldn’t be possible without barcode technology. Each one of these services would be more expensive if it weren’t for the way barcodes help make the tracking of inventory, personnel and assets effortless and efficient.
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If you haven’t deployed barcodes and barcode readers in your business, you could be missing out on an opportunity to bring in added efficiency and profit.
Barcode readers are made for retail
In retail businesses, point-of-sale barcode scanners bring greater efficiency to inventory management, helping with everything from reducing dependence on personnel, to keeping inventory at optimum levels.
To customers at stores, barcode-enabled checkouts are simply easier to deal with. Even in small stores and boutiques where long lines at the checkout are never an issue, it can be annoying to customers to have to wait through a laborious manual checkout process. With vendors such as EMSBarcode.com making barcode technology more affordable than ever before, even tiny, one-person stores are now able to deploy it.
Modern retail operations benefit in another way. With barcode scanners in their hands, floor sales personnel are able to quickly answer product-related questions by customers. When a customer asks about when a product will be in stock, for instance, a wireless handheld barcode reader could help sales personnel quickly obtain information, and make sure they keep the customer engaged.
If your business deals in online retail, barcode readers tend to be extremely useful as a way to minimize the possibility of error.
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If you need to keep track of your company’s assets
Barcodes don’t just help retail businesses keep track of their inventory. They can also be used to help businesses account for internal assets — laptops, office equipment and so on. An office that is interested in identifying and tracking its assets only needs to post a barcoded asset tag on each item, use a barcode scanner to scan the asset into the company database, and keep track of it as it passes through different hands around the company.
If you’re a nonprofit
Fundraising is one of the most challenging areas of work for any nonprofit. As organizations such as The Salvation Army and The International Red Cross have already discovered, placing a smartphone with a barcode-scanning app in the hands of fundraising supporters or volunteers can be an excellent way to boost efficiency. For instance, each time a volunteer collects a contribution for one of the causes supported by the nonprofit, a barcode scanner will allow them to quickly scan the right code for the cause that they have raised money for. The information, then, could right away get updated at the organization’s headquarters. Everyone would know how far along the fundraising drive was.
No matter what the organization, deploying a barcode system is always an excellent way to boost efficiency and reduce employee fatigue.