There exist several technologies serving the same purpose of quickly and accurately capturing data. The key automatic data collection technologies include bar coding, magnetic stripe, radio frequency data communication, radio frequency identification, voice data collection, machine vision, optical character recognition, and smart cards.
Bar coding is an industry standardized symbol consisting of bars and spaces of various widths that are read by optical scanning devices. The width and position of the bars are actually coded combinations of numbers, letters or punctuation, used to “identify the item, its producer and any other piece of information necessary to control its movement”.1 (Anonymous, “Industrial Engineering’s 1992 Automatic Identification Buyer’s Guide”. Industrial Engineering, p.BG1) The item is scanned, all its data is transmitted directly into a computer via electrical impulses, generated from light reflections from the bars and spaces. The impulses are measured by a......
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