Bar codes have been successfully used to identify products since the 1970s when they were first introduced to the grocery retail business. Since then, they have been widely adapted by other industries. Nearly every shipping and receiving department relies on bar coding technology to improve inventory visibility. Today’s manufacturer, however, can no longer be satisfied knowing how many raw components are coming in the door and the amount of completed product leaving the facility. Manufacturers must also know the status of their work-in-process inventory as well.

While the overall concept of product tracking is not new, the automated tracking of product down to the individual part and component level has proven to have even greater bottom-line impact. The most direct way to ensure complete quality control of the production process is to directly mark a part with a machine readable code and track it through its entire life cycle. This is called Direct Part Mark Identification (DPMI). Recognizing the benefits of direct part marking, many industryassociations have already established standards for marking individual parts and components for a variety of applications. The EIA, SEMI, AIAG, DoD, and the SPEC 2000 aerospace industry have all adopted DPMI standards for applications in their industry.

Additional companies are using DPMI for their own internal applications. DPMI can be used to optimize line performance, identify defects, increase first-pass yields and as a result, reduce the costs of manufacturing. Manufacturers also rely on DPMI for identifying incoming parts for maintenance and returns, resolving warranty issues and liability claims as well as tracking high-value components to prevent theft. Two dimensional symbols such as Data Matrix are the most common symbologies used for DPMI applications because of their small size, data capacity, error correction, and ability to be applied by a variety of marking methods. All a manufacturer needs is .1 inch of square space on a component and it can be marked with a 5 or 6 digit Data Matrix symbol. As a result, Data Matrix enables the traceability of components such as crystal oscillators or custom ASICs that in the past could not accommodate any type of machine-readable form of identification. While 2D codes have been in existence since the early 1990s, the introduction of the smart camera designed specifically for reading linear and 2D codes has enabled the widespread adoption of the technology in the last few years. Smart cameras have succeeded where vision systems have failed in providing manufacturers with a robust imaging solution capable of high performance read rates on directly marked symbols with the ease of use and price point of a bar code scanner.

Direct Part Mark Capable Readers