By Shawn Chen on 06 October 2010

GS1 Taiwan has lent its support to the country’s Bureau of Standards, Metrology and Inspection (BSMI) to revise national bar code standards.

The purpose of this amendment is to give full effect and the clear definition to national bar code standards for Taiwan’s industries. The first national bar code standards were drafted by GS1 Taiwan and published by Taiwan National Standard Committee (TNSC) in 1988.

Because foreign trade has been the engine of Taiwan’s rapid growth during the past couple decades, most Taiwan’s industries have desired to adopted the GS1 bar code system to keep the growth of foreign trade, increase productivity, the efficiency of business processes and reduce the operational costs.

According to the process of the BSMI, several leaders in industries, education, agencies and research centers were chosen by GS1 Taiwan to participate in the workgroup to amend national bar code standards. The main responsibility of this workgroup is to adopt international standards, GS1 bar codes and its identification system into Taiwan’s national standards, which is Chinese National Standards (CNS).

For this amendment, GS1 Taiwan has referenced ISO 15420:2009, ISO 16390 and GS1 General Specification to revise CNS 12408 and CNS 12409. These documents’ titles are shown below:

• CNS 12408: Bar Code Symbol for Uniform Commodity Code

• CNS 12409: Bar Code Symbol for Despatch Unit Code

One of the advantages for this revision is to help boost country’s global capability for industrial supply trade.

Also, as a GS1 Member Organisation, GS1 Taiwan strives to empower the core competences and competitiveness for the Taiwan business community in moving a step forward to the globe through adopting a common global language of business and standards of GS1.