Many organizations, especially in the retail industry (K-Mart, Sears, JCPenny etc.), have relied on bar code technology for more than decade. Item level bar coding has been standardized based on the UPC code numbering system.

UPC code is a concatenation of a UCC assigned unique manufacturing number with a unique product code maintained by each manufacturer. UCC stands for Uniform Code Council (UCC). The UCC is the governing and standardization body and is responsible for the issuing and managing of the UCC numbering systems.

An important standard in compliance labeling is the Serial Shipping Container Code (SSCC) and has increased importance when combined with EDI methodology. The SSCC concatenates a UCC assigned manufacturer/vendor ID with the manufacturer / vendor controlled Shipping Container Serial Number. Other than the bar coded field provided by the postal code field in the Carrier Section of the label this should be the only bar code on the shipping labels scanned by customers.

Advanced Shipping Notices (ASN) will be sent electronically ahead of time via EDI and provide the SSCC number as their main reference number. By scanning the SSCC bar code, shipments details such as Customer PO #, Line Items, Product Codes, and Quantities are retrieved from the ASN EDI data structure. This short format label, with only two fields bar coded (SSCC and Postal Code), is referred to as the Common Label Format as compared to the Extended Label Format which contains additional bar coded fields.

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