Bar codes permit faster and more accurate transfer and recording of information benefiting the track of work in process or the movement of assets more quickly and precisely. Significant time can be spent tracking down the location of assets, instruments, materials, anything that moves within a location or between companies. Bar codes can help speed the processes and improve the tracking of these items, saving your organization time in response to inquiries and change, because you can track exactly where items are.

Depending on the application, the time-savings can be very significant when a bar coding solution is successfully implemented. Often the most dramatic examples involve the tasks of inventory. One SATO customer required a crew of 25 employees working over a weekend for mid-year inventory; once they implemented bar codes this was reduced to 4 employees completing the inventory in 5 hours. Routine daily operations have a positive impact in saving time and resource as the use of bar codes expand and improve productivity. Consider another SATO customer who professed processing a shipment of 10 cartons of their product to a retail outlet customer. Previous to them embracing a bar code system; it took approximately 2-4 minutes, sometime more, to write down product codes and product serial numbers compared to 10 to 20 seconds now to scan the bar codes - and without numerical, description transposing errors. In a large operation this lead to significant reductions in time.