Barcoding

Since The RIC Group was established in 2001 almost every day we have received enquiries from prospects wanting to start barcoding. One of the most common business needs is to have a solution to print barcodes for the stock items. Our solution Labels4 allows customers to do this. It works with MYOB AccountRight Live, MYOB EXO, MYOB Advanced, SAP Business One and Sage 300.

Our Labels4 product uses a Zebra barcode printer to print barcode labels for stock items, bin locations and delivery labels. Most of the Zebra printers we use are ethernet connection which allows our customers to print from our software no matter where it is installed. This includes when customers have a on cloud or on premises ERP our Labels4 solution still allows users to print the barcode labels from a PC they have at the warehouse.

As we have had to help customers implement barcoding for their products in a number of industries such as food with catch weight or medical industry with batch and serial numbers we have knowledge about all the standards which are used such as GS-1, UPC, SSCC, EDI and HIBC. With this we have had also had to gain knowledge in a number of barcode fonts with our Labels4 product such as Code 128, GS-1 13, ITF-14, GS1 DataMatrix, GS-1 128, UPC 8, UPC 12, GS-1 8, GS1 QR Codes.

One of the most important parts to barcoding is ensuring the barcodes can be scanned efficiently. Most barcodes need to be achieving a 99.99% scan rate. When using a barcode scanner there are different configurations such as laser, 1D and 2D. The reason we use a barcode printer such as a Zebra GK 420d is to ensure the barcode which is printed is of high quality. Because we know at the next process is the barcode being scanned and it needs to be scanned for several processes such as stocktaking or scan picking or bin transfers. You can't have users of a warehouse management solution getting frustrated with the barcode not scanning and wasting time. This is a reason I would recommend printing barcode labels to a purpose barcode printer rather than to an A4 printer.

With our Labels4 product it uses Zebra Designer to design the layout of the label, and then this format is used when printing from our Labels4 software. This means the label format uses the actual ZPL (Zebra Printer Language) when printing the label format. It ensures quality for every label printed.

Recently a project involved that we print stock labels to a 30mm x 15mm label which is quite small. As the client was only using the barcode for internal use they had an item number which they wanted to print as the barcode. This item number was alpha numeric. When we first started to print the barcode labels, because of the length of the item number the barcode would be quite long and effect the scanning. Therefore we changed the font to a 2D Datamatrix and now the barcode scanning works perfectly.

​​When implementing barcoding always know what the end is in mind. Barcoding can be simple and cost effective and help with identifying products to help with inventory management. Talk to us at The RIC Group to better understand barcoding and see how it can be applied to help your business. Email us on [email protected] or call us on +61 3 9545 0404.
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