On the other hand, the "bar code" most commonly found on retail products
is a UPC - Universal Product Code. These are administered by the GS1
US (formerly the Uniform Code Council), and theoretically should be able
to be traced back to their registered owner.
~Brian
William Sutton wrote:
Having worked in a manufacturing firm (one of the largest in the world)
as one of the people responsible for the manufacturing software, I'll wade
in on this and give you the short and long answers.
The short answer (unsurprisingly) is no.
The long answer is somewhat more complicated.
First thing to remember about a barcode: it isn't magic. It takes
different patterns of rectangles to represent a single data character
(e.g., 0-9A-Za-z). Add to that the usual use of a start/stop bit to flag
the scanner that a data pattern has started/ended, and you're looking at a
small amount of data in that barcode.
This isn't really a concern since most of the time, the data represented
by the barcode is printed at the bottom (e.g., 001-4323-4439-A), and is
usually some sort of serial number.
Different serial numbers are constructed differently based on a number of
factors:
- How the business that contracted the product wants it composed
- How the manufacturer wants it composed
- Uniqueness concerns
- Lot/sublot/manufacture date desires
Generally you'll see one of a number of strategies employed:
- a block representing the lot/sublot
- a block representing the date
- a block representing the revision
- a block representing a unique sequence
Any of these can be fixed or variable width, and in just about any order
desired.
And that's for one manufacturer for one customer for one product. You
can appreciate the potential complexity involved, particularly considering
the fact that no one manufacturer is going to share this information with
its competitors.
Now, some of these numbers are standardized for one vendor across its
products (think Lenovo ThinkPads) so that any repair work can follow a
standardized serial number format and product repair process (think RMA).
Nonetheless, that may necessitate a manufacturer code being added to the
serial number so that one can know who worked on it...
As a final aside...lots of information is tracked by the serial number.
Depending on what is kept by whom, you can have as little information as
the manufacturer or as much as every step of the manufacturing process
including test results.
HTH :)
--
----------------
Brian A. Henning
strutmasters.com
336.597.2397x238
----------------
--
TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/
TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
