9 Reasons It’s Time to Start Using Barcodes in Your Business
September 7th, 2015
1) You’re losing money from incorrectly entered information.
Mixing up one product SKU for another is easy to do, and this easily results in lost money, upset customers, and reduced productivity. Time spent re-entering information is time wasted. With barcodes, information is entered correctly each and every time.
2) Your regular inventory counting is taking way longer than it should.
Hand-counting inventory is a costly, labor-intensive process. Using barcodes you can quickly track not just the items themselves, but the quantity in a case or pallet, the picking location, or anything else you might need.
3) You need to start tracking serial numbers
Managing a SKU by itself is fairly straightforward, managing individual serial numbers for each and every unit is an order of magnitude more difficult to manage in a simple, fast way. By using barcodes to track your serial numbers, you’ll be saving an exponential amount of time.
4) You’re paying people to manually key in data for hours on end
In our modern data driven economy, paying people to key in data is a waste of your business resources. Barcoding can be used to store any piece of information you might need to track, and with AdvancePro, you can use a scanner at any stage of a transaction, meaning you can place orders for vendors, take an order from a customer, count inventory, ship, and receive all without ever touching a keyboard.
5) You need to train new employees regularly
Memorizing product SKUs and their locations in the warehouse is a thing of the past. This lag when you bring on a new employee can be significant, and it means they need to shadow co-workers or work slowly for far longer than they should. Their scanning should be their guide as they are directed to the correct picking locations for the product they need, pick the correct product, and complete orders just as fast as their experienced counterparts. In a seasonal business this is an enormous boost to your warehouse capabilities instantly.
6) You want to reduce warehousing labour costs and Improve order fill-times
The single best way to improve warehouse efficiency is by moving to a system that uses handheld devices. This reduces unnecessary trips to the office to do paperwork and it keeps your warehouse workers working in the warehouse and focused on serving your customers better.
7) You’re losing track of orders on paper
Paper orders waste time. Paper orders get lost. Paper orders need manual re-entry. There is simply no reason to be using paper in the warehouse to manage how your warehouse crew works. A single handheld device tracking all the necessary tasks for the day ensures that nothing gets lost and that your warehouse crew doesn’t need to find a printer if anything changes. Customer orders can be picked and shipped minutes after they are received without any oversight from management and without a single tree giving its life.
8) You deal in products that are billed based on weight
You don’t need to weigh product each and every time you deal with it. Weigh it once, put that information in a barcode, and label the unit. When it comes to shipping the product, the barcode is scanned, and the correct weight can be accounted for without the product touching a scale. Customers get served faster, with less work from your employees.
9) You want to enter multiple pieces of information in a fraction of a second
Barcodes aren’t limited to a single piece of information, you can store everything you need to track in a single barcode. So for instance you could receive a SKU, and record its serial number, weight, and quantity all with a single barcode scan. This can turn hundreds of scanned items into a single barcode to receive on.
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