Marked benefits

摘要

The Tesco supermarket where I shop must sell close on 8,000 different items from bras to diesel to couscous. It's one of those vast stores that spans three time zones. And virtually every product it sells has a barcode. The ubiquitous blip blip blip of the till barcode reader as the bored checkout girl passes my shopping in front of the scanner is music to the ears of Tesco's information technology department. But just as the technology lets the supermarket chain track who is buying what, how much is being sold and how much needs to be ordered, so it can also let engineering companies track goods through their life cycle, deal with orders more efficiently, cut out flab in stockholding and fight parts piracy.