[TriLUG] central bar-code database?

[William Sutton]

Having worked in a manufacturing firm (one of the largest in the world) 
as one of the people responsible for the manufacturing software, I'll wade 
in on this and give you the short and long answers.

The short answer (unsurprisingly) is no.

The long answer is somewhat more complicated.

First thing to remember about a barcode:  it isn't magic.  It takes 
different patterns of rectangles to represent a single data character 
(e.g., 0-9A-Za-z).  Add to that the usual use of a start/stop bit to flag 
the scanner that a data pattern has started/ended, and you're looking at a 
small amount of data in that barcode.

This isn't really a concern since most of the time, the data represented 
by the barcode is printed at the bottom (e.g., 001-4323-4439-A), and is 
usually some sort of serial number.

Different serial numbers are constructed differently based on a number of 
factors:
- How the business that contracted the product wants it composed
- How the manufacturer wants it composed
- Uniqueness concerns
- Lot/sublot/manufacture date desires

Generally you'll see one of a number of strategies employed:
- a block representing the lot/sublot
- a block representing the date
- a block representing the revision
- a block representing a unique sequence

Any of these can be fixed or variable width, and in just about any order 
desired.

And that's for one manufacturer for one customer for one product.  You 
can appreciate the potential complexity involved, particularly considering 
the fact that no one manufacturer is going to share this information with 
its competitors.

Now, some of these numbers are standardized for one vendor across its 
products (think Lenovo ThinkPads) so that any repair work can follow a 
standardized serial number format and product repair process (think RMA).  
Nonetheless, that may necessitate a manufacturer code being added to the 
serial number so that one can know who worked on it...

As a final aside...lots of information is tracked by the serial number.  
Depending on what is kept by whom, you can have as little information as 
the manufacturer or as much as every step of the manufacturing process 
including test results.

HTH :)

-- 
William Sutton



On Mon, 13 Feb 2006, Greg Brown wrote:

> All:
> 
> Is there such a thing has a "central" bar code database?  A central DB to
> query a bar code that will return basic information like manufacturer, name
> of product, stuff like that?  All the POS systems I've ever worked with had
> to have data manually entered, product by product, and defined by a human
> with product names, etc.  Granted, one would have to set the prices
> manually, but it seems there ought to be a way to query a centralized
> database for this information.  If there was not a central DB to track all
> this information how can it be assured that products are given unique bar
> codes?  I would imagine it's something like Ethernet addresses were you have
> a manufacturer field and a unique code for that one device.
> 
> Anyway... central query able bar code DB.  Does this exist?  A quick google
> search seems to say "no".
> 
> Greg
> --
> TriLUG mailing list        : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
> TriLUG Organizational FAQ  : http://trilug.org/faq/
> TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
> 
>