Barcode Technology - EAN-13 Barcode               Hide the description

EAN-13 is unique identifiers (barcodes) used to identify new, branded products sold at retail. The products contain

the EAN number or GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) to identify itself.

Valid characters: 0123456789

EAN-13 is one of the many barcode formats currently in use.

A Barcode is a method of representing data in a visual, machine-readable form.

The barcode formats has two categories:

One-dimensional (1D) --- Barcodes represented data by varying the widths and spacings of parallel lines.

Two-dimensional (2D) --- Using rectangles, dots, hexagons and other geometric patterns to represented data.

EAN - European Article Number, but is now referred to as The International Article Number. It is a standard

describing abarcode symbology and numbering system used in global trade to identify a specific retail product type, in a specific packaging configuration, from a specific manufacturer. EAN barcodes are used worldwide for lookup at retail point of sale, each retail product has its unique EAN-13 number.

EAN barcodes only represent the digits 0–9, it cannot represent other characters.

The most commonly used EAN standard is the thirteen-digit EAN-13, the less commonly used 8-digit EAN-8 barcode

was introduced for use on small packages, where EAN-13 would be too large. 2-digit EAN-2 and 5-digit EAN-5 are supplemental barcodes, placed on the right-hand side of EAN-13 or UPC. These are generally used for periodicals like magazines or books, to indicate the current year's issue number; and weighed products like food, to indicate the manufacturer's suggested retail price.

The 13-digit EAN-13 number consists of four components:

**  GS1 prefix - 3 digits

The first three digits of the EAN-13 identify the GS1 Member Organization which the manufacturer has joined (not necessarily where the product is actually made). Each manufacturer by the numbering authority indicated by the GS1 Prefix. Some EAN-13 codes which beginning with 0 are actually 12-digit UPC codes with prepended 0 digit.

**  Manufacturer code - variable length

The manufacturer code is a unique code assigned to each manufacturer. EAN-13 uses "variable-length manufacturer codes". Assigning fixed-length 5-digit manufacturer codes, means that each manufacturer can have up to 99,999 product codes. In the publishing industry( ISBN and ISSN), this component is used to identify the language in which the publication was issued and managed by a transnational agency covering several countries.

**  Product code - variable length

The product code is assigned by the manufacturer. The product code immediately follows manufacturer code. The total length of manufacturer code plus product code should be 9 or 10 digits depending on the length of country code (2-3 digits). In ISBN, ISMN and ISSN, it uniquely identifies the publication from the same publisher.

**  Check digit

The check digit is an additional digit, used to verify that a barcode has been scanned correctly. It is computed modulo 10, where the weights in the checksum calculation alternate 3 and 1. In particular, since the weights are relatively prime to 10, the EAN-13 system will detect all single digit errors. It also recognizes 90% of transposition errors (all cases, where the difference between adjacent digits is not 5).

Calculation of checksum digit

The checksum is calculated as sum of products - taking an alternating weight value (3 or 1) times the value of each data digit. The checksum digit is the digit, which must be added to this checksum to get a number divisible by 10 (i.e. the additive inverse of the checksum, modulo 10). See ISBN-13 check digit calculation for a more extensive description and algorithm. The Global Location Number(GLN) also uses the same method.

Human Readable:

Most barcodes display their corresponding values below them, which makes it possible to human read and manually  enter the barcode values into the equivalent system when the barcode label is worn out and cannot be read by the barcode scanner.

The different of EAN and UPC (Universal Product Code):

They are both Global Trade Item Numbers (GTINs), with the difference being UPCs are one digit shorter (12) and are more commonly used in the United States and Canada.

Advantages:

It's not required to label all articles with the price. The price is stored in the database and can be accessed via the barcode number. There is no need to manually calculate the price of the product. You only need to use the POST system to scan the EAN barcode on each product purchased by a customer. Because each product has its own unique EAN number, the POST system can get the corresponding price of each product in the database and calculate the total amount. It is fast and safe because there is no way to make a mistake.

History:

In 1977 the EAN code was used by 12 countries (all the countries of the European Community). Today, use of the EAN code has spread to all west European countries, USA, Canada, Australia and Japan. Today the EAN is called GTIN (Global Trade Item Number).

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