POS Equipment: How Businesses and Industries Benefit
Check-out Lanes and Beyond
Most people think of retail stores when they think “Point of Sale,” and they would be correct. But the more comprehensive application is of Inventory Management and Control. Any product that has or can hold a bar code label—whether it’s a can of coffee, a new pair of jeans, a patient wrist band, a desktop calculator, or a pallet of parts—can fall into inventory control parameters. So long as the “what or who” and “where” questions are involved, inventory management plays a part.
The primary purposes behind POS equipment are two-fold:
–Reduction of Shrinkage: Shrinkage is loss through mismanagement or theft. Using POS equipment reduces shrinkage, because each bar coded item is tracked through the using organization’s system from ordering to the customer’s hands outside the final store. POS equipment ensures the expected price is charge and paid for an item, and it prevents easy theft or accidental misplacement at any point along the product’s path.
Hospitals use POS equipment for electronic chart entries and medical management of patients. Small, specialized printers produce patient wrist bands, laboratory specimen tags, and chart identification labels to ensure the right patient receives the right lab test and noted in the right chart.
–Manhour Productivity: POS inventory control maximizes each employee’s work potential, using technology to enhance the item accountability processes within the organization and speeds throughput of shippers, receivers, retail organizations, and businesses. Employees spend less time finding and assigning equipment or goods electronically than they did utilizing the “eyeball, fingers, and toes” method before bar code labels were invented. What used to take days can now take only a few hours, saving billions in expenses every year.
Elements of POS Equipment
Point-of-Sale equipment encompasses a wide spectrum of elements, including charge card payment processing. Primary elements include even more.
Inventory control software delineates item information that is imbedded in bar code labels and can include an item’s description, cost, name, and point of origin. Software can also track to whom equipment is assigned or transferred. Some software can even note security protocols on who can and cannot access or change label information and institute overrides and tracking procedures in case of unauthorized access and modification of bar code information.
Bar code printers print direct thermal or thermal transfer bar code labels that imbed product or patient information. Depending on application, bar code labels can be one-quarter inch wide or several inches wide. Labels can include postal codes, one-dimensional code format or two-dimensional, ensuring data encryption both vertically along solid lines or vertically along multiple lines within the encoding bars. Bar code printers can sit over a foot high or just a few inches and embrace wide application spectrums.
Bar code readers or scanners capture the imbedded data and translate the electronic format into readable language by the user and the system, allowing real-time data display and accountability control. Most bar code readers are inserted in check-out lanes or are hand-held. However, the large “gate-like” stands near retail entrances are bar code scanners that send alerts that items that have not been electronically accounted for have been detected.
Conclusion
Any business, manufacturer, distribution center, or hospital or lab can find Point-of-Sale equipment optimizes inventory control, reduction in shrinkage, and service enhancements while improving wage and inventory management ROI.
To find out more what Point of sale software and systems can do for your business, please visit retail POS system.
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