Barcode Quality: Making Sure You Really Know What You Think You Know
Friday, December 05, 2008
Posted in: Barcodes
It’s a very common scenario: you have a non-local vendor who prints your barcodes. Let’s say it’s a gift card or a product package. You’ve done your due diligence: the vendor knows you hold him accountable for barcode quality: you’ve defined the expected ANSI grade and you have specified when, how and with what verifier you expect reports. All the bases are covered—so you think. Nevertheless, your customer has just notified you that your first-read rates are substandard and you might be getting fined.
How can this happen?
Well, assuming the problem at the vendor isn’t an out-of-calibration verifier or an imager-based verifier that doesn’t test print contrast or reflectivity or some other hardware issue, the problem could be a basic lack of understanding about quality testing.
We visited a printer recently where just such a problem arose. They had state-of-the-art verifiers and a person in charge of quality tasked to test barcode output according to a proscribed program. We were sent there because their customer, in spite of all these precautions, had received a quality action from their customer, a major retailer. The problem? The quality guy thought his job was to scan—and scan, and scan and scan—each barcode until he got the grade his boss wanted. Then he saved that record and moved on to the next barcode and repeated the procedure.Up until that point, his boss was happy. Now the whole job was in jeopardy and the customer’s confidence in the vendor was mortally wounded. How could the situation be resolved? What to do?
This is a situation in which an independent barcode auditor is probably the only immediate solution. The long-range solution, of course, is to retrain (or replace) the quality guy, but the quick and effective fix is to get unbiased, third-party barcode quality testing in place, and fast.Third-party barcode testing and auditing services, while somewhat exotic, are neither unheard-of nor necessarily expensive. A good independent barcode test lab does not need to be a one-size-fits-all solution, although where there is either willful or ignorant misrepresentation of quality as in the scenario above, the independent barcode tester might have to camp out at the vendor site in order to assure accurate, unbiased sampling. The test procedure is one thing; pulling the samples to be tested is another; both are crucial to viable, clean test results.
Third-party barcode test services need not be long-term relationships. A good barcode lab should work quickly and efficiently to establish a baseline from which a customer should be able to make intelligent decisions going forward about the vendor’s ability to produce an acceptable product. If the vendor is capable of meeting the quality specification, then the only remaining issue is whether or not they want to. There are no other excuses, and the source of the quality problem and their future relationship with the customer comes into a very clear focus.At the 10,000 foot level this all seems ludicrous. What can somebody possibly be thinking when they blatantly sabotage a quality-assurance initiative when poor quality will reveal itself relatively quickly downstream? Don’t people understand that you simply cannot conceal poor quality?
There are basically two answers to such a question. When someone in a quality-control position is deliberately passing sub-par product to inflict injury on an individual or an organization, that is one thing; more often, sub-par product gets past an inspector who is either untrained or is ill-trained in what doing a good job looks like. One example of this is the inspector we encountered in this scenario. Another is the inspector who thinks they are paid to fail everything. Both are lurking liabilities to their employers and their customers—and their future, and themselves. Most often such people sincerely intend to do a good job and truly believe that they are doing a good job. And their colleagues and supervisors also believe this—which makes it more difficult to detect and correct the problems they cause.Independent Barcode Testing and Barcode Auditing Services can help detect and even prevent this devastating scenario. A third-party Barcode lab can validate that an in-house testing program is performing as it should. Some testers offer training programs to help in-house quality personnel get up to speed and stay current on barcode quality procedures, and proper use of barcode verifiers and interpreting verifier output.
For information about barcode testing, auditing and quality training services, see http://www.fotel.com/barcode-solutions/service
Comments
respondig to lyndraud
Posted by on 01/19 at 11:00 AM
does anyone have experience with using barcodes when scanning copies of incoming invoices?
Posted by on 01/17 at 09:24 PM