It might be hard to conceive of going back to the days before barcodes. There are thousands of places where barcodes play an invisible role in every facet of our daily lives. Today any business that buys, sells, ships or manufactures products can gain operational efficiencies and competitive strength through the application of barcode technologies. By using barcodes as a solution, you may achieve the following benefits:

• Fast and reliable data collection: a barcode scanner can record data significantly faster with better accuracy than a skilled typist can. In fact, barcodes have 10,000 times better precision than manual data entry, which creates an average of one error in 300 keystrokes. For industries such as healthcare or manufacturing, these mistakes could be life threatening and damaging to any business.
• Reduced costs and losses: reduced labor costs and losses from data entry errors are the most obvious advantages of barcode data collection. In most companies, it does not take many data entry errors to amount to a great deal of lost revenue. Using barcodes to keep a tight handle on inventory is also a great method to save on capitol costs.
• Better management and decision making: managerial decision making often occurs as a result of automated data collection. A barcode system can easily collect information that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to gather. By collecting data automatically, managers will benefit greatly from real-time information. With more information, they can make faster, fully informed decisions and respond quickly to new opportunities.