Founded in 1852 in Sacramento, California by Levi Strauss, the company manufactures jeans and casual wear under its leading global brands: Levi’s®, Dockers® and Denizen®.

The company employs approximately 5,000 people around the world, with a presence in more than 110 countries.

The traditional identifcation solution in Italy is based on the EAN-13 barcode and unfortunately presents several management inefficiencies. Each individual Iper store had to adopt its own internal coding for variable weight products, leading to inconsistent information regarding the same product being sold in multiple store locations.

In order to calculate the actual amount sold from store to store for each product, it was necessary to decode each identification number centrally, which resulted in a time-consuming and counterproductive process.

Finally, in order to know the amount (weight) sold for each product, it was mandatory to recalculate the sales prices (data collected at checkout) based on the price per kilo, which caused a variety of inaccuracies due to rounding and human error.

By deploying catalogues that call upon the GS1 Global Data Synchronisation Network (GS1 GDSN®), two Group Purchasing Organisations (GPOs) in France have made it fast and easy for healthcare sector manufacturers to make more of their products available to hospitals, nursing homes and pharmacies.

Many suppliers in the global healthcare sector need to manage a huge number of product references—from 5,000 up to 10,000 or more for a single manufacturer. Companies in this sector also must respect a range of frequently changing regulatory requirements, some of which are designed to create a harmonised and consistent approach to product identification.

The company wanted to take steps to achieve traceability for increased food safety for its franchisees’ restaurants and their hundreds of thousands of customers who dine at these restaurants each day.

DineEquity is collaborating closely with McLane Foodservice (McLane), an industry supply chain leader and one of its major distributors, to implement caselevel traceability across its entire system. Drawing on McLane’s experience with GS1 Standards, DineEquity approached its suppliers about the value of using GS1 Standards. Today, many of DineEquity’s suppliers use GS1-128 barcodes that carry detailed product information to its distributors’ centers.

Evident in its brands, Crystal is committed to innovative design and the development of collections by highly qualified, socially aware designers.

Crystal vertically integrates its operations across eight manufacturing plants in Colombia, including spinning and dyeing textiles and manufacturing garments and hosiery.

Five distribution centres ensure that Crystal maintains its competitiveness and flexibility when meeting consumer demand for products, which are widely distributed via retail franchises located throughout the Caribbean and Central and South America.

The company needed to efficiently produce these individualised systems while ensuring each system was built and delivered to the right customer.

The company assigns and applies a serialised GS1 Global Trade Item Number (SGTIN) encoded in a durable GS1 DataMatrix barcode on each system, which also contains the serialised GS1 Global Trade Item Numbers (SGTINs) of the components that comprise the system.

About a decade ago, produce growers in the U.S. and Canada worked together on an end-to-end traceability initiative with the ultimate goal to trace food crops back to the fields of origin.

The challenge for Ocean Mist Farms was to make its proprietary product identification system and process interoperable with the rest of the industry, including shippers, retailers, and distributors.

Like many other hospitals in Taiwan, KAFGH had a manual process for updating their medical device and material documents.

Their UDI project introduced three changes:

• The implementation of auto-identification for medical materials and devices.
• Improve cost and quantity control of inventory management for medical materials and devices.
• Introduce traceability of implanted medical devices to patients.

However, its use in healthcare has been sporadic, and implementation of RFID is challenging if global standards aren’t used.

JJSC received a request from a hospital for a customer-specific RFID tag on products. The RFID team quickly launched a rapid test-and-learn cycle to prove technical and business feasibility and explored existing system connections to provide a globally accessible serialised tracking solution. JJSC also took the opportunity to implement standardisation utilising GS1 standards.

In the early 1990s, a group of visionaries stated that the current way to identify actors in the Swiss healthcare industry was far from sustainable and very inefficient. Every actor — such as healthcare manufacturer, distributor, hospital, pharmacy or medical doctor—was identified in multiple ways.

For example, a medical doctor might have been identified differently by the national accident insurance, by a group of health insurances, by different private (accident) insurances, by the federal military insurance, by federal disabilities insurance, by the federal narcotic control, by groups of manufacturers, by each wholesaler, to name a few! In short, the doctor had to manage many different identification codes when corresponding and invoicing each of these organisations. With this lack of standardisation, accuracy was impossible and efficiencies in healthcare processes were nonexistent. The visionaries understood that new processes would only be possible if a robust, accurate and scalable identification system was provided by a neutral source for all of the Swiss healthcare industry.

Now, for nearly 30 years, this solution enabled by the GS1 Global Location Number (GLN) has been in place. Global Location Numbers support the needed identification system by uniquely identifying each of the actors and their locations. The GLN has proven to be the “right choice” in standardising and simplifying the identification of all stakeholders, offering significant benefits for the Swiss healthcare system. By choosing the GS1 GLN as the global identification key, the visionaries have strengthened the use of GS1 standards in the healthcare industry and helped stakeholders understand how globally unique identification can link master data and improve logistical and clinical processes.