Barcodes in Construction

Barcodes are commonplace these days. You find them everywhere from the side of a can of beans to the boxes delivered to your door. High Street retailers use them all the time and yet they are not common on construction sites. Why is this?

There are some good reasons. Shops, warehouses and distribution centres are, by and large, clean and dry places. The goods and locations in a warehouse are all in neat piles and, where at all possible, packaged in rectangular boxes or sealed plastic bags. I’m sure you will have noticed how a certain online retailer loves to deliver everything in neat cardboard boxes, even if it means delivering a lot of free air in the process, In these circumstances barcodes have a nice flat place to live. They are going to stay clean and dry. This is the kind of world that barcodes like best. And even here the simple 1D barcode is used in preference to the more complicated and hence, more fragile 2D codes.

Unfortunately a construction site is not such a friendly place for bar codes. The nature of many items, such as their size or shape means that there is often no good place to locate a barcode. Rough handling, exposure to weather, and other factors mean that barcodes can be torn, damaged or lost. And not to forget UV stability. Printed labels can fade very quickly after exposure to sunlight.

What do you code? That single truss or assembly? That bag or box? The pallet , container or stillage?

In some cases suppliers will put a barcode on their materials. However Supplier 1 may use a different code for exactly the same item , as Supplier 2. Supplier 1 might even use the same code as Supplier 2 but for something completely different! And of course some things are assemblies, unique to a particular project.

In some circumstances barcodes, or their high tech cousin, RFID tags have a place. For example hired tools or equipment often have codes to identify exactly what they are and where they came from.