Technical FAQs
Since they first rolled out in supermarkets in the 1970s, barcodes and barcode scanners have become essential tools in today’s globalized economy. No longer confined to retail shelves and supplier warehouses, barcodes are used across multiple industries to streamline operations and improve data accuracy. Given their continued importance, it’s helpful for developers to keep the key advantages of barcodes in mind as they build applications that could benefit from them.
Four Key Barcode Benefits
1. Efficiency
Since scanning a barcode automatically enters a large amount of data into a system, they are incredibly valuable for streamlining recordkeeping and improving efficiency. Modern supply chain and inventory management simply would not be possible without the use of barcodes. Rather than manually entering inventory and shipment data for every item into a system, employees can simply scan entire pallets, crates, and even shipping containers to instantly know what contents they contain inside. Given the sheer scale of products moving through a supply chain, barcodes allow companies to automate a key process to save time and money even as they scale operations. Barcode scanners can also streamline onboarding and training since it takes much less time to teach someone to use a scanner than to manually enter data.
2. Error Reduction
Manual data entry is notorious for its high levels of human error. According to research conducted over several decades, even workplaces with the best performance measures in place see human error rates of five to ten failures in every hundred opportunities. That’s a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong, whether it takes the form of inverted characters, skipped lines, misreadings, illegible markings, or faulty keystrokes. Even worse, once an error occurs, it will often be reproduced across a system, making it very difficult to locate and remediate the original mistake. According to one estimate, errors resulting in bad data cost businesses more than $600 billion each year. Scanning a barcode, by contrast, completely automates the data entry process and significantly reduces the risks associated with manual errors. Information encoded into a barcode will be reproduced accurately each and every time the image is scanned to ensure consistency across systems.
3. Tracking
Each time a barcode is scanned, it creates another step in a data trail that can be easily referenced to locate items and events. This allows businesses to greatly improve real-time visibility into their operations. From identifying a shipment’s most recent location or determining whether or not a patient picked up their prescription from a pharmacy, barcodes help organizations and customers alike to track down information quickly and accurately. By improving visibility throughout their systems, companies can deliver a better customer experience that builds trust and prioritizes transparency. Since barcodes are easy to create and print, they can be added to almost any type of business process to streamline productivity and track essential activities.
4. Data Collection
Today’s organizations rely heavily upon data analytics to formulate their business strategy and make key decisions. The more data they have available to them, the more nuanced and accurate their analysis will be. Barcodes play a critical role in data collection strategies. Not only are they used to gather information about inventory, supply chain, and sales activity, but the latest generation of QR codes (a common form of 2d barcode) are also being deployed to learn more about customer behavior and preferences. Thanks to real-time QR code tracking, companies can see how many times the barcode is scanned, where it was scanned, and what devices were used to scan it. Gathering more extensive barcode data provides a more detailed picture of what’s actually happening “on the ground” throughout an organization and in the market. By eliminating conjecture and guesswork, businesses can make much more informed decisions that will help them to sustainably scale operations and capitalize on opportunities.
Barcode Use Cases by Industry
Although most commonly associated with retail and logistics, barcode scanners are deployed across many industries to improve efficiency and accuracy. Here are a few of the most common use cases:
- Education: From student ID cards to tracking school equipment, educational institutions utilize a variety of barcode types and barcode scanners to streamline operations.
- Government: Federal, state, and local governments use barcode scanning to manage access to secure facilities, catalog physical assets, and organize records. The ability to quickly create barcodes is essential for agencies that need to catalog and track documents and materials.
- Legal, Insurance, & Finance: Various forms of barcodes can be used to improve document management, making it easier to track and organize contracts, applications, and invoices as well as flag sensitive documents that require additional security precautions.
- Healthcare: Barcodes have long been used to streamline hospital processes such as admitting patients and accessing patient records with a simple scan rather than a protracted (and error-prone) manual process. They are especially useful for managing medications and ensuring that critical prescription information like strength and dosage remains accurate and consistent.
- Retail: A classic use case for barcode scanning, retailers use barcodes every day to manage their inventory, track sales, and reduce shrink. Handheld barcode scanners have made it easier than ever for them to process transactions, access product information, and locate products.
- Supply Chain: Barcode scanning technology has helped to automate key elements of logistics across multiple industries. As companies continue to do business around the world, the ability to easily track shipments and provide information to customs authorities is more crucial than ever before.
Implementing Your Barcode Solution
Despite the clear benefits of barcodes, many applications lack the basic functionality necessary to read barcodes, much less write them. Luckily, integrating those features is easy to do with the help of a code-based SDK barcode toolkit like Accusoft’s Barcode Xpress. With support for more than 30 barcode types and the powerful image processing capabilities that can clean up and repair barcodes that are broken, damaged, or poorly printed, Barcode Xpress can enhance the functionality of barcode scanners or allow Windows and Linux-based systems to locate and read barcodes on documents. Capable of reading up to 1,000 pages per minute, Barcode Xpress can turn your application into a barcode scanning powerhouse. Visit our product overview to learn more about how Barcode Xpress can solve your application’s barcode scanning needs.
Many organizations utilize spreadsheets to track data and perform complex calculations. Since spreadsheets offer substantial flexibility, it’s not uncommon for a single organization to use them in a variety of ways. For instance, one department might use them for budgeting while another deploys them for risk assessment. Although they can handle complex calculations, spreadsheets are relatively easy to set up and don’t require the same programming knowledge as more specialized solutions. That accessibility has led many organizations to simply convert Excel to web applications using API integrations rather than building new functionality from scratch.
Why You Should Convert Excel Files to Web Applications
Consumers often turn to financial and insurance companies looking for simple answers to simple questions:
- How many payments will it take to eliminate my debt?
- Will adding another person to my insurance policy change my rate?
- What will the monthly payments on my loan cost based on different interest rates?
To answer questions like these, someone in the organization typically enters the customer’s data into a premade spreadsheet, applies a few conditions using preset formulas, and shares the result. This process could be significantly streamlined by making these calculations readily available as a web application to anyone who visits the firm’s website, allowing both prospective and current customers to get answers quickly while also freeing up time for employees to work on more high-value tasks.
Unfortunately, building a secure, functional web application takes up valuable development resources. A developer could easily spend weeks converting complex spreadsheet formulas into a fully-functional application that integrates into the website or larger platform seamlessly. Even worse, if anything about those formulas were to change (as is often the case with financial and insurance formulas), more development resources will need to be pulled away from existing projects to make the updates.
By converting Excel files to web applications, firms can avoid these problems and provide clients with ready access to the calculations they need. FinTech and InsurTech developers can accommodate this need by building integrations into their solutions that allow users to easily upload and share spreadsheets entirely within an application and without any Microsoft Word dependencies. This bypasses the time-consuming build process and makes it much easier to update the formulas as needed.
Keeping Your Spreadsheets Secure
Of course, making spreadsheets readily available as web applications presents a few important security challenges. Many of the calculations running inside an organization’s spreadsheets are proprietary or contain hidden data that needs to remain private for various confidentiality reasons. That’s why companies are hesitant to simply send copies of their internal spreadsheets to customers or vendors. If those Excel files are made accessible online, there’s an obvious risk that someone could download a copy for themselves or access valuable private intellectual property.
Incidentally, this is also the reason why many firms struggle with sharing spreadsheets even in a collaborative environment. Not only are .XLSX files among the most commonly used file extensions by malware, but granting cloud providers or email servers access to spreadsheets represents too great a security risk for companies in heavily regulated industries.
By converting Excel to web applications, however, organizations can maintain strict access and visibility controls over their spreadsheet files. A good spreadsheet viewer integration will allow users to determine what people see when they use the application and also what information they can access. Formulas and calculations that contain vital intellectual property can be hidden completely. Visitors can be restricted to only editing cells that apply to their information, allowing them to use the spreadsheet without breaking or altering its functionality.
Sharing controls can also restrict what can be downloaded locally. A visitor may need to download or print a copy of their calculations, but they don’t need to download a fully functional copy of the spreadsheet file. Even in a collaborative environment, allowing people to download and edit copies of a spreadsheet can introduce significant version confusion. By keeping everything safely within the confines of the organization’s larger web application, essential data remains as secure and up-to-date as possible.
Other Reasons to Convert Excel to Web Applications
The versatility of spreadsheets allows people to adapt them to a variety of uses. In addition to more traditional budgeting and adjustment tasks, they can also be used for things like calculating survey results, analyzing resource usage, or estimating server uptime. Adding customizable calculators that provide quick results to a website experience can provide customers with important information and keep them engaged.
Rather than building a specialized app or plug-in for every one of these calculators, organizations can simply use a spreadsheet viewer integration to quickly create one without any specialized coding or development knowledge. When the integration is set up within their solution, they can even customize it to match their branding and make it look more like a designed application than a simple spreadsheet.
Explore the Potential of Spreadsheet Integration with PrizmDoc Cells
Accusoft’s PrizmDoc Cells was originally designed to help our clients securely view and share XLSX files without any third party dependencies, but it’s increasingly being used to help improve customer experiences across a variety of applications. Get a hands-on experience with this API-driven integration to explore the potential of converting your Excel files to web applications. For a more detailed overview of what you can do with PrizmDoc Cells, sign up for a free trial.