Datalinx Blog

To have a warehouse wireless survey – or not?

Providing large facilities such as a warehouse with wireless is not a straight forward task and without planning can end up with inadequate coverage and suffer from low performance. To prevent this from happening you can commission a Research Frequency (RF) site survey. This enables an appropriate wireless network to be designed that will deliver the coverage, data rates, roaming capabilities, resilience and network capacity you require.

The government has produced a protocol to use auto-identification and data capture (AIDC) and GS1 standards to improve care delivery, enhance patient safety and reduce costs.

GS1 UK is working with the NHS and Department of Health to make healthcare in the UK more efficient and ultimately improve patient safety. From April 2014, the guidance and requirements on patient safety contained within the NHS eProcurement Strategy document are applicable to all organizations that provide NHS services through the NHS Standard Contract.

All other guidance and requirements in the document will additionally be applicable to acute NHS Foundation and non-foundation trusts.

GS1 UK standards can help your organization accurately identify, capture and share information; and streamline your supply chain.

According to Dr Dan Poulter MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Health; "NHS eProcurement strategy will establish the global GS1 coding and PEPPOL messaging standards throughout the healthcare sector and its supporting supply chains. Compliance with these standard will enable trusts to control and manage their non-pay spending by;

• the adoption of master procurement data
• automating the exchange of procurement data
• benchmarking their procurement expenditure data against other trusts and healthcare providers..."

The strategy also drives patient safety benefits. Barcodes based on the GS1 standard can be read at any point in the healthcare supply chain so that a product subject to the safety alert can be quickly located and recalled. Providers of NHS funded healthcare, including the independent sector must be able to electronically track and trace individual medicines and medical devices to a specific patient...

As an example of how the eProcurement Strategy will be beneficial the following diagram shows the key procurement flows in the purchase-to-pay and category management processes and shows how each process flow is driven by master data, supported by the global standards, national infrastructure and local infrastructure that are required by the eProcurement strategy (Information taken from the eProcurement document).

The information above was provided by the NHS eProcurement strategy document and the GS1-UK website.

For more information please visit  http://www.gs1ukinhealthcare.org/  

The language used in the warehouse can a bit confusing! Especially with all the abbreviations, so below are some of the Datalinx team favourites!

3PL: Third party logistics

ADC: Automated data collection

APS: Advanced planning and scheduling

ASN: Advanced shipment notifications are used to notify a customer of a shipment. Often including purchase order numbers, SKU numbers, lot numbers, quantity, pallet or container number, carton number

Whilst it is easy to blame the warehousing system when you scan a 1D linear barcode and it fails to read, often this is not the case and there is a very simple reason for the error. We often find that it might be a quiet zone failure connected to the printing and/or layout of the barcode itself.

The quiet zone is the empty space area around the barcode that enables the scanning device to establish where the barcode begins and ends and thus allow it to read the label.

There is usually a simple reason for a quiet zone error. It could be that when the barcode was printed on the carton the ink “bled” on the absorbent cardboard and thus made the bars a different width rendering them illegible....

Tracking products through the supply chain

This is covered by various acronyms; GS1 global standards / GTIN or EDI and focuses on using barcodes which are machine readable character strings which can be created using linear symbology, are typically between 30-40 characters or could be a matrix code of up to 2000 characters. These symbologies could be compared to a foreign language with syntax and construction rules and industry standard defined codes are EAN or UPC.