7 Major Applications of Barcode Scanners You Should Know

From mighty manufacturing facilities, fancy restaurants, and shopping malls to tiny roadside shops, barcodes are seen almost everywhere now. The simple yet effective technology involved in barcoding makes businesses of all sizes adapt and leverage barcode scanning. Here are seven major applications of barcode scanners.

Patient Identification in Healthcare

Barcode scanning is useful to identify patients and ensure that the right patient gets the right medical treatment. Apart from providing more accuracy in identification than other manual processes, barcode wristbands let hospital staff use additional data to improve patient safety. For instance, while dispensing medication, the health workers can simply scan the barcode wristband to call up the electronic health record of the patient and administer the prescription after verifying it with the record. 

As barcode wristbands provide accurate inputs, they are best leveraged when combined with automated medication administration systems, electronic health records, computerized physician order entry (CPOE), or any other automated procedures. They work collaboratively to help reduce errors at every stage of care, including specimen collection and processing, test and therapy administration, patient transfers, and meal management.

Improved Customer Experience with Barcode Shopping

Barcode Shopping Improves Customer Experience

Customers’ purchasing experiences can be made easier and more engaging by using barcodes or QR codes. Customers often have concerns about things. Thus barcodes or QR codes can be put on the products or beside them in the store to direct them to more information. Furthermore, as Decathlon shows, barcodes can be used to establish virtual retail malls. When it launched an app to help customers avoid long lines, it employed the notion of putting QR codes on price tags. Customers could scan QR codes on price tags and make payments directly from the app using the app. Customers could scan QR codes on price tags and make payments directly from the app using the app. This type of client experience leads to customer loyalty, which helps a company grow.

Providing Smooth Air Travel

Barcode scanners are used for streamlining air travel. It provides speed and accuracy in baggage handling and helps staff in managing travel operations better. Besides, passport scanning functionality and document scanning can be integrated with the barcode scanner to ensure airport compliance. Passengers can also scan their own passports when checking in online using barcoding scanning software on their phones, avoiding the possibility of human error and alerting them to an out-of-date passport. This minimizes wait times at check-in desks and speeds up the check-in procedure.

Easier Direct Part Marking (DPM)

Direct Part Marking (DPM) is used in electronics manufacturing, automotive industry, medical devices, and aerospace to permanently mark products and parts with crucial product information, such as part numbers, serial numbers, and date codes. While DPM codes help to manage and track devices and components, it can often become challenging to scan these etched codes because of surface imperfections, bad lighting, distortions in dots, and low color and contrast.

Quicker Parcel Tracking

Barcode scanners ensure high speed and accuracy in parcel tracking. Accountability and efficiency. Searching, tracking, and sorting parcels becomes much easier and faster with quick scanning. They ensure streamlined parcel tracking and ensure that packages are delivered faster without errors.

In-store Barcode Advertising

In-store advertising with barcode scanners allows retailers to engage customers in a more engaging, entertaining, and unique way. People can learn a lot more about a product being sold simply by scanning barcodes with their smartphones. QR codes, for example, can be used inside stores to promote new product lines or to boost social media presence by linking the code to social media profiles.

Simplifying Retail

The most common application for barcode scanners is in retail. UPC barcodes are seen on nearly every product sold in stores. They’re utilized as pricing tags in retail; this barcode keeps track of items in stores and records information like the price, where they were created, and what batch of goods they originated from. In addition to the unique product number, a UPC barcode includes the manufacturer’s information.

With an online barcode scanner, retail enterprises with big inventory may make regular stock counts faster. They can save time by not having to count stock manually. It’s critical to conduct a stock audit to identify any in-stock quantity differences caused by loss, damage, or theft. Online barcode scanners with additional capabilities enable stock counts to be completed more quickly, section by section, shelf by shelf, or location by location. Data from the barcode scan is put into the software system, where it is automatically matched to data in the program to provide an accurate stock audit report. The present barcoding system additionally gathers different numbers, including item pricing, allowing large orders to be processed quickly.

Barcoding is a highly versatile technology and can be applied in various use-cases, as we’ve already seen above but not limited to those. Though there is already a considerable share of larger businesses that have successfully started the use of barcode campaigns, there is still much left to get the most out of barcode scanners.