GS1

Last updated

GS1
Company typeNot-for-profit organisation
IndustryStandards
Founded26 April 1974;49 years ago (26 April 1974)
Headquarters Brussels, Belgium
Number of locations
116 offices worldwide [1] [2]
Key people
Renaud de Barbuat (CEO)
Revenue30,662,000 Euro (2021)  OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Website www.gs1.org

GS1 is a not-for-profit, international organization developing and maintaining its own standards for barcodes and the corresponding issue company prefixes. The best known of these standards is the barcode, a symbol printed on products that can be scanned electronically.

Contents

GS1 has 116 local member organizations and over 2 million user companies. Its main office is in Brussels (Avenue Louise).

History

In 1969, the retail industry in the US was searching for a way to speed up the check-out process in shops. The Ad Hoc Committee for a Uniform Grocery Product Identification Code was established to find a solution.

In 1973, the Universal Product Code (UPC) was selected by this group as the first single standard for unique product identification. In 1974, the Uniform Code Council (UCC) was founded to administer the standard. [1] On 26 June 1974, a pack of Wrigley's chewing gum became the first ever product with a barcode to be scanned in a shop. [1] [3]

In 1976, the original 12-digit code was expanded to 13 digits, which allowed the identification system to be used outside the U.S. In 1977, the European Article Numbering Association (EAN) was established in Brussels, with founding members from 12 countries. [4]

In 1990, EAN and UCC signed a global cooperation agreement and expanded their overall presence to 45 countries. In 1999, EAN and UCC launched the Auto-ID Centre to develop Electronic Product Code (EPC), enabling GS1 standards to be used for RFID. [5]

In 2004, EAN and UCC launched the Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN), a global, internet-based initiative that enables trading partners to efficiently exchange product master data. [4]

By 2005, the organisation was present in over 90 countries, and it started to use the name GS1 on a worldwide basis. Whilst "GS1" is not an acronym, it refers to the organisation offering one global system of standards. [4]

In August 2018, the GS1 Web URI Structure Standard was ratified, allowing unique ID's to be added to products by storing a URI (a webpage-like address) as a QR code. [6]

Barcodes

The GS1 barcodes Gs1-barcodes.png
The GS1 barcodes

Barcodes defined by GS1 standards are very common. [7] GS1 introduced the barcode in 1974. [8] A barcode encodes a product identification number that can be scanned electronically, making it easier for products to be tracked, processed, and stored.

Barcodes improve the efficiency, safety, speed and visibility of supply chains across physical and digital channels. They have a crucial role in the retail industry, including today's online marketplaces, moving beyond just faster checkout to improved inventory and delivery management, and the opportunity to sell online on a global scale. In the UK alone, the introduction of the barcode in the retail industry has resulted in savings of 10.5 billion pounds per year. [1] [9]

Some of the barcodes that GS1 developed and manages are: EAN/UPC (used mainly on consumer goods), GS1 Data Matrix (used mainly on healthcare products), GS1-128, GS1 DataBar, and GS1 QR Code. Notably, GS1 barcodes can hold more than just a single numerical identifiers, as GS1 has defined a modular & arbitrarily combinable semantic encoding of defined data within GS1 barcodes through the publication of over 150 "Application Identifiers" (AI). [10] These AIs allow encoding of details such as the GTIN - AI:(01), the "Country of Origin" - AI:(422), and the "Expiration date" - AI:(17), amongst many other possibilities, including URLs - AI:(8200). [10]

Standards

The most influential GS1 standard is the GTIN. It identifies products uniquely around the world and forms the base of the GS1 system.

Main GS1 standards are as follows:

Many GS1 standards are also ISO standards, including the GTIN, GLN, and SSCC. [11]

GS1 also acts as the secretariat for ISO's Automatic identification and data capture techniques technical committee (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 31). [12]

GS1 standards are developed and maintained through the GS1 Global Standards Management Process (GSMP), a community-based forum that brings together representatives from different industries and businesses.

Industries

Retail and marketplaces

Retail was the first industry that GS1 began working with and has remained their primary focus. Today, GS1 operates in four retail sub-sectors on a global level: Apparel, Fresh Foods, CPG and General Merchandise.

Key focus areas in retail include sustainability, data quality, compliance with regulatory requirements, traceability of products [13] from their origin through delivery, and upstream integration between manufacturers and suppliers.

As consumers are recurring to e-commerce more often throughout the years, GS1 has developed standards that uniquely identify products for the benefit of consumers and for search engines, providing accurate and complete product information digitally. [14]

Major e-commerce companies such as eBay, Amazon and Google Shopping require companies to use a GS1 GTIN to sell on their websites. [15] [16] [17]

Healthcare

Since 2005, GS1 has operated in Healthcare with the primary objective to enhance patient safety, and to drive supply chain efficiencies.

More than 70 countries have healthcare-related regulations or trading partner requirements where GS1 standards are being used for the above reasons as well for medicines as medical devices. Members of GS1 Healthcare include more than 140 leading healthcare organisations worldwide. [18]

Other industries

GS1 operates three other key industries globally: Transport & Logistics, Food service and Technical Industries. GS1's 116 Member Organisations in over 116 countries around the world collectively focus on dozens of industry sectors. [19]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ISBN</span> Unique numeric book identifier since 1970

The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a numeric commercial book identifier that is intended to be unique. Publishers purchase or receive ISBNs from an affiliate of the International ISBN Agency.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Universal Product Code</span> Barcode symbology used for tracking trade items in stores

The Universal Product Code is a barcode symbology that is widely used worldwide for tracking trade items in stores.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barcode</span> Optical machine-readable representation of data

A barcode or bar code is a method of representing data in a visual, machine-readable form. Initially, barcodes represented data by varying the widths, spacings and sizes of parallel lines. These barcodes, now commonly referred to as linear or one-dimensional (1D), can be scanned by special optical scanners, called barcode readers, of which there are several types.

There are many different numbering schemes for assigning nominal numbers to entities. These generally require an agreed set of rules, or a central coordinator. The schemes can be considered to be examples of a primary key of a database management system table, whose table definitions require a database design.

Articles related to standards include:

A check digit is a form of redundancy check used for error detection on identification numbers, such as bank account numbers, which are used in an application where they will at least sometimes be input manually. It is analogous to a binary parity bit used to check for errors in computer-generated data. It consists of one or more digits computed by an algorithm from the other digits in the sequence input.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electronic Product Code</span> Universal identifier for physical object

The Electronic Product Code (EPC) is designed as a universal identifier that provides a unique identity for every physical object anywhere in the world, for all time. The EPC structure is defined in the EPCglobal Tag Data Standard, which is a freely available standard. The canonical representation of an EPC is a URI, namely the 'pure-identity URI' representation that is intended for use when referring to a specific physical object in communications about EPCs among information systems and business application software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Code 128</span> Barcode format

Code 128 is a high-density linear barcode symbology defined in ISO/IEC 15417:2007. It is used for alphanumeric or numeric-only barcodes. It can encode all 128 characters of ASCII and, by use of an extension symbol (FNC4), the Latin-1 characters defined in ISO/IEC 8859-1. It generally results in more compact barcodes compared to other methods like Code 39, especially when the texts contain mostly digits. Code 128 was developed by the Computer Identics Corporation in 1981.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barcode printer</span> Computer peripheral to print barcode labels or tags

A barcode printer is a computer peripheral for printing barcode labels or tags that can be attached to, or printed directly on, physical objects. Barcode printers are commonly used to label cartons before shipment, or to label retail items with UPCs or EANs.

The Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) is an identifier for trade items, developed by the international organization GS1. Such identifiers are used to look up product information in a database which may belong to a retailer, manufacturer, collector, researcher, or other entity. The uniqueness and universality of the identifier is useful in establishing which product in one database corresponds to which product in another database, especially across organizational boundaries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International Article Number</span> Standard barcode system used in global trade

The International Article Number is a standard describing a barcode symbology and numbering system used in global trade to identify a specific retail product type, in a specific packaging configuration, from a specific manufacturer. The standard has been subsumed in the Global Trade Item Number standard from the GS1 organization; the same numbers can be referred to as GTINs and can be encoded in other barcode symbologies defined by GS1. EAN barcodes are used worldwide for lookup at retail point of sale, but can also be used as numbers for other purposes such as wholesale ordering or accounting. These barcodes only represent the digits 0–9, unlike some other barcode symbologies which can represent additional characters.

"Bookland" is the informal name for the Unique Country Code (UCC) prefix allocated in the 1980s for European Article Number (EAN) identifiers of published books, regardless of country of origin, so that the EAN namespace can catalogue books by ISBN rather than maintaining a redundant parallel numbering system. In other words, Bookland is a fictitious country that exists solely in EAN for the purposes of non-geographically cataloguing books in the otherwise geographically keyed EAN coding system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">EAN-8</span> EAN/UPC symbology barcode

An EAN-8 is an EAN/UPC symbology barcode and is derived from the longer International Article Number (EAN-13) code. It was introduced for use on small packages where an EAN-13 barcode would be too large; for example on cigarettes, pencils, and chewing gum packets. It is encoded identically to the 12 digits of the UPC-A barcode, except that it has 4 digits in each of the left and right halves.

The Global Location Number (GLN) is part of the GS1 systems of standards. It is a simple tool used to identify a location and can identify locations uniquely where required. This identifier is compliant with norm ISO/IEC 6523.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GS1 DataBar Coupon</span>

The GS1 Databar Coupon code has been in use in retail industry since the mid-1980s. At first, it was a UPC with system ID 5. Since UPCs cannot hold more than 12 digits, it required another barcode to hold additional information like offer code, expiration date and household ID numbers. Therefore, the code was often extended with an additional UCC/EAN 128 barcode. EAN 13 was sometimes used instead of UPC, and because it starts with 99, it was called the EAN 99 coupon barcode, and subsequently GS1 DataBar. After more than 20 years in use, there is now a need to encode more data for complex coupons, and to accommodate longer company IDs, so the traditional coupon code has become less efficient and sometimes not usable at all.

Barcode technology in healthcare is the use of optical machine-readable representation of data in a hospital or healthcare setting.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GEPIR</span>

The GS1 GEPIR was a distributed database that contains basic information on over 1,000,000 companies in over 100 countries. The database could be searched by GTIN code, container Code (SSCC), location number (GLN), and the company name. A SOAP webservice exists.

GS1 EDI is a set of global electronic messaging standards for business documents used in Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). The standards are developed and maintained by GS1. GS1 EDI is part of the overall GS1 system, fully integrated with other GS1 standards, increasing the speed and accuracy of the supply chain. Examples of GS1 EDI standards include messages such as: Order, Despatch Advice, Invoice, Transport Instruction, etc. The development and maintenance of all GS1 standards is based on a rigorous process called the Global Standard Management Process (GSMP). GS1 develops its global supply chain standards in partnership with the industries using them. Any organization can submit a request to modify the standard. Maintenance releases of GS1 EDI standards are typically published every two years, while code lists can be updated up to 4 times a year.

Barcode library or Barcode SDK is a software library that can be used to add barcode features to desktop, web, mobile or embedded applications. Barcode library presents sets of subroutines or objects which allow to create barcode images and put them on surfaces or recognize machine-encoded text / data from scanned or captured by camera images with embedded barcodes. The library can support two modes: generation and recognition mode, some libraries support barcode reading and writing in the same way, but some libraries support only one mode.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MicroPDF417</span>

MicroPDF417 is two-dimensional (2D) stacked barcode symbology invented in 1996, by Frederick Schuessler, Kevin Hunter, Sundeep Kumar and Cary Chu from Symbol Technologies company. MicroPDF417 consists from specially encoded Row Address Patterns (RAP) columns and aligned to them Data columns encoded in "417" sequence which was invented in 1990. In 2006, the standard was registered as ISO/IEC 24728:2006.

References

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  18. Anonymous (23 December 2014). "Healthcare". www.gs1.org. Archived from the original on 7 May 2017. Retrieved 28 April 2017.
  19. "GS1 Strategy". www.gs1.org. Archived from the original on 17 January 2018. Retrieved 28 April 2017.