Gs1 registered barcodes form the backbone of the economy in South Africa. All retail products have barcodes, and all owe the efficiency of the modern retail scanning revolution to their invention. Barcodes have in fact been around since the early 1960's but have only come into regular use within the last 25 years. They are now common place within all South African shopping establishments and have been incorporated into the design of most modern cash registers.
Prior to the introduction of barcoding technology, shop tellers were forced to manually input sales into their cash registers. While effective on a small scale and certainly still in use today, this laborious method did not allow for 3 key components of the stock management process:
1. Fraud management - With simple printed numbers representing the price of an item, it was too easy for people to simply stick their own prices onto items, thereby fooling the cashiers into adding an incorrectly priced item to the total bill. This was a significant problem for very large retailers such as Pick n' Pay, Shoprite Checkers and Spar; all of whom reported annual losses to fraud in the hundreds of millions per financial year.
2. Inventory management - Prior to the introduction of barcodes, stock management within retail outlets was a difficult and inefficient process. As a result of the introduction of barcodes, together with the incorporation of correct database technology, this process was simplified immeasurably.
3. International product tracking - With the introduction of barcodes, one is able to log your product information on international barcode databases. There are numerous such databases in existence, but the most well know one is certainly the GS1, UPC and EAN number registries. In South Africa, GS1 has a significant footprint on the market and the database in question is fully stocked and well maintained.
Since the introduction of barcodes in South Africa, these issues have been largely resolved. There have also been numerous other introductions to the market which have also helped to establish EAN and UPC codes as the method of choice for retail product distribution and management.
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