Smart Manufacturing

CASE STUDY 2Bar Coding, the Most Ubiquitous and Most Critical IIoT Technology

Anthony Tarantino, PhD

Introduction

Of all the smart technologies in use today, none is better known by both manufacturing and the general public than the barcode. It was invented in 1951 by Bernard Silver and Norman Joseph Woodland. They based their invention on a type of Morse code that they extended to thin and thick bars. It took another 20 years to make barcode technology commercially viable. One of the earliest use cases for barcodes was to identify individual railcars, but the technology proved unreliable and was abandoned.

The big breakthrough for barcodes came in supermarkets, to automate the checkout system. The system is now used universally in all types of retail and industrial operations based on George Laurer's Uniform Product Code (UPC), which uses a system of vertical bars.¹ In the mid-1990s a type of matrix, or 2D bar code, called a QR code was developed that has grown in popularity with smartphone users.²

Barcodes play a similar and vital role in just-in-time (JIT) Lean manufacturing by providing point-of-use inventory movements. As with retail, barcodes are scanned to reduce or decrement inventory levels when items move through the various stages of production and finally reach the shipping dock. Without barcodes Lean systems would not be practical, requiring workers to key in part numbers and inventory information for every item that moves into finish goods or onto loading docks ...