Now is the Time to Build a Stronger Barcode Quality Program
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Posted in: Standards
Extraordinary Times Bring Unique Opportunities
There is a balance to be struck between pessimism and optimism, and that balance is a very elusive, even rare commodity these days. If you’re like me, you are pretty weary of the default pessimism and plenty skeptical of anything optimistic. Both poles are most often unhelpful.
But this business climate does hold some opportunity. There is work that can be done now that was more difficult to get to when things were rocking. For example, your quality initiative.
Implementing a barcode quality initiative or re-evaluating and improving the effectiveness of an existing one is an opportunity these times may be offering to your organization. At the risk of stating the obvious, when business is bad, mistakes can be even more damaging to a business relationship, costly to correct and difficult to recover from.
To take the point a step further, this is not “…something to do while nothing else is going on…” This reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw a few years back: “Jesus is Coming—Look Busy.” Building a stronger barcode quality program is not busy work, or something to do while the company is hunkering down in survival mode. A company with a reputation for barcode quality is competitively advantaged over one who can only talk price.
And what is a “…strong barcode quality program…”? It is a program that is carefully conceived and smartly implemented. It is neither understated nor extravagant—just like wise talk and action in a tough economic environment, it is balanced. More times than I can recount, when the marketplace was busy, no one seemed to have time to plan. Lots of equipment was purchased reactively and while some resellers thought it was great, many barcode quality programs and they companies they were intended to protect were not served well. Times like these are an opportunity to correct that. Times like these provide a moment to pause and prepare for the future. When things are rocking once again—and those good times will inevitably return some day—those who avail themselves of this special opportunity will find their efforts to have been a great investment.
And that brings me to the final point. Barcode quality, like economic recession, is most often framed in negative terms. A common comparison of a barcode quality program is to insurance, languaged in terms of risk management. The counterbalance to this is ROI—return on investment. A well crafted barcode quality program will not only save the company money, it will more than pay for itself over a relatively brief period of time. While the math for this is somewhat ethereal, the logic is solid. A vendor with a great barcode quality program will help their customers anticipate and avoid barcode-related problems, detect barcode problems when they occur and correct them more rapidly than a competitor with a weaker or non-existent barcode quality expertise. That is what everybody recognizes as value and even (and especially) in hard times, value is what everybody is seeking.
Poor barcode performance is an often-overlooked aspect of supply chain optimization.
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