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JDF vs. Barcodes
March 26, 2008

According to the Wikipedia, the KISS principle (acronym for "Keep It Simple, Stupid") states that design simplicity should be a key goal and unnecessary complexity avoided. What many people don’t realize is that the kiss principal flies in direct contrast to the BLGT principle (new Howie acronym for “Buy the Latest Greatest Technology”).

These two principles often compete and then someone has to make the call as to which principal wins. As you may have guessed I recently had to weight the pros and cons in one of these battles and make the call. I can’t go into much detail but here are the high level points.

A printing company is creating a pilot, automated, manufacturing line. Its too early to tie it into the main MIS system but they still need a strategy to monitor production, reorder material, track waste, create shipping labels, send email confirmations and allow the customers to reorder products quickly and easily.

The two warring strategies were JDF and barcodes. The fans for JDF would argue that the JDF option is a better strategy because it is  part of standard and will be the defacto standard one day. The advantages of the bar code strategy would be that it was cheap, fast, and easy to implement.

The downside of the JDF strategy is that it usually requires new equipment to make it work and they are still working out the interoperability bugs. The downside of the bar code is that it is somewhat older technology and will most likely be replaced with JDF or something else (RFID) in the future.

In this case I felt the advantages of KISS outweighed the advantages of BLGT. But you have to carefully consider the pro’s and con’s every time you face this.

Posted by Howie Fenton on March 26, 2008 | Comments (1)