Please click here to learn about the Sunrise 2005 initiative. Due to the limitations of early technology and programming, a sunrise date was established in the early 2000’s to prepare retailers and manufacturers for the changes. GS1 has continually changed the standards of the issuing numbers, since GS1 standards are being integrated by other industries and more companies are requiring prefixes. Since the inception of bar codes with the UPC more than 45 years ago, hundreds of thousands of possible number combinations have been issued as manufacturer or company prefixes. Since the original UPC-A was only 12-digits, this resulted in a massive undertaking but the open door for GTIN data structures to be globally accepted. In the early 2000s retailers had to make accommodations to their original database structures to accept GTINs and the full 14-digit data string. GTIN changes this by separating the name of the data structure from the data carrier or, in this case, the symbology. In most cases, the legacy terminology and the symbology are called by the same name. The table below further illustrates the relationship between GTIN, legacy terminology, symbologies and use at point of sale. Therefore, these symbologies support the GTIN data structure without changing the number of encoded data characters. Both UPC and EAN have an implied packaging level of a single item. Of these, ITF-14, GS1-128, and GS1 Databar employ 14-digit data structures of which the 14th character is a packaging level indicator (i.e., item or case). Today, five symbologies support this GTIN data structure: UPC EAN ITF-14 GS1-128 and GS1 Databar (formerly Reduced Space Symbology).

Ucc 128 gs1