GS1 numbering and barcodes are designed to deliver two fundamental benefits:
- to ensure that your organization operates as efficiently as possible
- to integrate seamlessly with your trading partners
The ultimate aim is to maximize the competitiveness of your supply chain.
The GS1 System allows continuous improvement in ecommerce supply chain management practices by providing international standards for item identification, data capture, electronic messaging and data synchronization. These standards are also being enhanced and expanded to reflect business needs and advances in technology.
Through the automation of business processes, the GS1 System drives increasingly fast, efficient and accurate flow of information between trading partners, factors that are fundamental to the success of any business.
Importance of standards
The GS1 System is a universal global standard, which means all users follow the same coding rules. As a result, GS1 numbers and barcodes can be recognized by trading partners anywhere in the world.
What's more, the numbers issued by GS1 are unique, so no product can be confused with another.
The benefits of such a system to all parties in the trading cycle are the reduction of costs and time, while increasing accuracy and efficiency through the management of the entire supply chain.
Supply chain efficiency: the key to competitive success
Increasingly, corporate success is based, not on having the best product, but on having the best supply chain management practices.
An efficient supply chain allows your company to build better relationships with trading partners today, and ensure your products and services achieve greater competitiveness and demand tomorrow.
An efficient supply chain gives your organization the following economic advantages:
- Improved return on investment by reducing inventory holdings and associated financial costs
- Increased sales by reducing or eliminating out-of-stock situations
- Better customer service by speeding up delivery times, continuous replenishment and ensuring predictable stock availability
- Greater productivity due to improved tracking of stocks and materials, which reduces administration time and costs
- Increased profitability as cost analysis can be refined through more accurate activity based costing
Just as standardized GS1 barcodes have facilitated efficient international trade, GS1 e-commerce standards will offer even greater efficiencies tomorrow.
Developed in response to mounting demand from manufacturers, retail chains and government departments which continually seek means to reduce costs and increase efficiency, these standards will make the transition to e-commerce as simple as possible, by providing solutions that build on - and integrate seamlessly with - the existing numbering and barcoding system.
e-commerce will save companies considerable time and effort by automating many of the processes that now rely on the manual processing of paper-based documents. Equally importantly, the automation process increases accuracy of documentation by eliminating many of the repetitive steps where mistakes can easily occur.