If taking inventory of your small-medium sized company seems like a pain, then can you imagine how large companies do it? Since it’s often too expensive to shut down for even a day, large companies cycle count to keep track of their inventory.

Basically, cycle counting is constantly validating the accuracy of the inventory in a system by regularly counting a portion of the inventory on a regular basis so that ever item in the inventory is counted at lease several times a year.

In contrast to traditional physical inventory counts, cycle counting does not stop a facility’s operations and provides an ongoing measure of inventory accuracy. With cycle counting, companies can enjoy:

• Confidence in an accurate inventory count
• Operational efficiency
• Less inventory write-offs

In order to perform accurate cycle counts, many organizations use software in order to implement an inventory control system, often a part of a warehouse management system. This could include mobile computers with integrated barcode scanners, allowing workers to automatically identify items, and enter inventory counts via keypad. From there, the software transmits data to the host database system, which can easily generate inventory reports.

If you’re interested in the tools needed to begin cycle counting your inventory, you can learn more here.

The Lexmark T654 monochrome laser printer now has an option to be equipped with the Lexmark RFID UHF Option, allowing the printer to produce individual RFID tags that can be attached to individual files, hardware, or other items that need to be tracked and accessed with ease.

With the Lexmark T654 RFID UHF Option, the printer can output up to 20 RFID tagged pages per minute, which can be arranged horizontally or vertically on materials from 5” x 7” to 8.5” x 14”.

Once printed, the tags can easily be stuck on items or included in boxes, allowing a locator device to track down the item via serial number.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) recently announced it’s decision to use Intermec devices such as the CK3 mobile computer, CN3 mobile computer, SR61 handheld barcode scanner, PD42 commercial barcode printer, PF8 desktop printer, and the PM4i RFID printer to improver the Department’s operational efficiency and productivity. However, Intermec’s relationship with the DoD is nothing new. Intermec has provided the DoD and Federal government agencies with AIT technologies for asset tracking, inventory control, automated warehousing, and depot/distribution management.

The DoD has continued to do business with Intermec because of their high quality products and commitment as a trusted supplier. If your company is looking for mobile solutions, you’ll want to look into their products. Learn more about Intermec and their products here.

Here at barcode.com, we’ve mentioned near field communication, or NFC, a fair amount of times, but what exactly is it? Basically, Near Field Communication is a short-range, high-frequency form of wireless communication that enables data to be exchanged between devices approximately 4 inches apart. NFC is a simple extension of RFID that combines the interface of a smartcard and a reader into a single device. It is primarily used in mobile phones, but has also been popping up in other applications such as touchatag.

Both NFC and Bluetooth are forms of short-range communication technology that are integrated into mobile phones, however, NFC requires a shorter set-up time. Rather than performing manual configurations to identify Bluetooth devices, the connection between two NFC devices is established at under a tenth of a second. In addition, unlike Bluetooth, NFC is compatible with existing RFID structure and can work when one of the devices is not battery powered.

There seems to be a strong following of people who favor NFC to similar technologies. To learn more about NFC, you can visit the NFC forum here.

The Pharmacode barcode is used in the pharmaceutical industry as part of their packing control system and is specially designed to be read, despite any printing errors. In order to ensure that the remainder of the packaging is correctly printing, the Pharmacode may also be printed in multiple colors.

Unlike other 1D barcodes, the Pharmacode does not store data in human-readable digits, but rather, the number is encoded in binary rather than decimal. In addition, Pharmacode can only represent single integers from 3 to 131070. Because of this, the minimum number of bars is 2 and the maximum is 16, so the smallest number that could be encoded, 3, would have two narrow bars, and the largest, 131070, would consist of 16 wide bars. It is also read from right to left, making the Pharmacode a very unique and industry specific barcode.