For seven years already the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Krasnodar Region has been rendering the total package of services to companies and entrepreneurs so that they can acquire the right of use of the bar code for the produce manufactured.

What is the bar code? At least once everyone has seen a pattern like a zebra consisting of the combination of black stripes and blank spaces between them on the packing of foreign and domestic goods. But, you didn’t think about what is was, and it is the bar code which encodes certain number of     alphabetic and digital characters.

Bar code is a character meant for computer-aided identification and recording of information about an article of commerce encoded by way of digits and bars.

Unlike many other information characters the bar code performs not only general information and identification functions, but a number of optional functions as well.

Among them are the following:

-     computer-aided identification of goods by means of reading machines;

-     computer-aided control and recording of stock of goods;

-     on-line control over the process of goods movement at an enterprise.

Bar coding technologies is a new achievement of engineering progress.  Bar codes are the simplest, cheapest and most reliable element of the systems for computer-aided identification which are widely used in various fields of activity.  

What for is there a bar code on goods? On the one hand, for manufacturers the bar code is kind of a “quality mark” in the eyes of the customer who most often prefers goods with the bar code when choosing any, because it bears reliable information about the article of goods and its manufacturer. On the other hand, we can note activation of the process of introduction of high end computer technologies at commercial establishments, because they first have been touched upon by the necessity of automated management of constantly growing flow of goods, namely computer-aided recording of goods in accountancy. Examples of such commercial establishments in our city are as follows: the supermarkets “Krasnaya Ploschad”, “Eldorado”, “Tabris”, “Robin Bobin”, the store network “Magnit”, book stores “Dom Knigi”, libraries, etc. It is quite natural that goods manufacturers were required to put bar codes on the manufactured produce too. In this connection, domestic goods manufacturers have to take care of marking their products with bar codes to ensure successful promotion of their products. At this point we explicitly face a nagging and a very pressing problem.

         How to acquire the right of use of the bar code for the produce manufactured? At present there exist two systems of computer-aided identification in the territory of the Russian Federation: national (OSK) and international (EAN). National system is presented by the non-commercial partnership “Unified system for produce encoding” (Moscow), and the international system is presented by the Association of automated identification “UNISCAN/GS1 RUS” (Moscow).  Cooperation with these associations is based on their voluntary membership.  Significant difference between the systems lies in the purposes of product promotion. If a goods manufacturer has no intention to export its produce abroad, including the CIS and the Baltic States, it is reasonable that it gets the national bar code. If the company wishes to cooperate with foreign countries with the object to export its produce and conclude long-term contracts, it is required that the produce be marked according to the international standards, So, first of all, you should obtain the certificate from the AAI “UNISCAN/GS1 RUS”.