We are thrilled to share that Supply & Demand Chain Executive, the only publication covering the entire global supply chain, has named PathGuide Technologies Founder & Chairman David Allais as one of its 2024 Pros to Know – honoring David with the prestigious Lifetime Achievement award for his outstanding contributions to the supply chain space.
This recognition is well-deserved. Not only for David’s 50+ years of pioneering work and entrepreneurship in the Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC) field – including 35 years of PathGuide’s success (and counting!) – but also for his ongoing, active involvement in the industry. The legacy David has created and persists to build upon through his work will continue to provide lasting value within the supply chain industry, and to society, for years to come.
“Many of today’s supply chain pros are more than just leaders within their space; they’re innovators, decision makers, pioneers of change and growth. They’ve spent the last year (and more) creating safer, more efficient supply chains,” says Marina Mayer, editor-in-chief of Supply & Demand Chain Executive and Food Logistics. “These winners continue to go above and beyond to overcome challenges, advance supply chain management and make the impossible, possible.”
A Prolific, Pioneering Problem-Solver
David is an internationally recognized industry expert in the fields of barcoding and automatic identification. David has exhibited positive influence throughout his career in terms of lifetime achievement. After receiving his Master of Science degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Arizona in 1958, he went on to serve in various engineering and engineering management positions at IBM in California and New York state from 1958 to 1968. However, while David’s work with IBM was interesting, it did not inspire his entrepreneurial spirit nor fulfill his desire to provide lasting value to society. He wanted to work for a small company where he could focus on solving real-world problems in business and industry. From IBM, Allais landed at a young startup, Interface Mechanisms, later named Intermec, where he could put his technical knowledge and creative skills to work by developing innovative ways to use the upcoming technology of barcodes.
In the following Q&A, an excerpt from his November 2018 interview with GS1, David outlines a few fascinating and noteworthy examples in more detail.
GS1: What was one of the first problems you solved at Intermec?
David Allais: Intermec offered a better form of paper tape printing, called a Dual Image system because it contained both text and data. We were trying to sell it to the Plessey Company in England. Plessey wanted to know if our machine could print the proprietary barcode labels it needed for a library circulation system. This presented an opportunity.
Plessey needed a reliable device to print its unique barcode labels to exacting tolerance. Intermec needed a product with a future. So, I got the specifications, put together a breadboard that could actually print accurate Plessey code, whipped out a proposal, flew over to England and visited Plessey, and handed them my samples which they read with a wand scanner. The result was we got a contract to develop, and subsequently manufacture and sell, a mechanical barcode printer for printing Plessey code, which was used then in libraries.
GS1: How did your work with Plessey change things for you and for the industry at large?
David Allais: Finding the need at Plessey to print barcodes is something I would never have thought of on my own. I wasn’t even aware of the existence of barcodes until this deal with Plessey came our way. Yet, once we had a printer that customers could connect to some form of computer and enter data and make barcode labels, that changed everything.
Remember, the barcode label printers developed by Intermec were electromechanical devices. But it led to what we have today where high-quality barcode symbols are produced on-demand by laser printers, thermal printers, and ink jet printers. It’s different from a printing press that just turns out hundreds of thousands of identical labels. If a retailer is selling meat, cheese or produce by the pound, every package is different and needs a different code. So that gave us a tremendous opportunity, once the UPC was standardized, for providing demand printers for UPC. But we would never have gotten there had it not been for the Plessey code.
GS1: How important was the standardization of barcodes?
David Allais: The early systems that Intermec developed printers for were all closed systems within a specific business environment. In Plessey’s case, it had a library system and the proprietary code to apply on books. Monarch had its codabar labels to market in retail and to sell printers and wand readers. We had systems for Dupont to label yarn reels that were being spun by serial number and machine sequence. But all these systems—the printing, the reading, the structure of encoding and the barcodes—all of these were absolutely closed systems within a single corporate entity or for the corporation’s customers.
So, it wasn’t until the UPC symbology was standardized and accepted in the U.S. grocery industry, that we had a standard that could be adopted. Anybody developing a scanner or a printing methodology or printing products like canned goods—all they had to do was to conform to this standard and it would work. Now, we have open standards that, of course, have spread significantly beyond the UPC’s birthplace in food retail.
GS1: And adopting this open standard made the technology grow faster?
David Allais: Absolutely, much faster. On the industrial side, the U.S. military standardized on my Code 39 and required it on all inbound materials. Then, within about two years, companies in the U.S. automotive industry had their own requirements involving Code 39.
We were then faced with the issue about how, in an open system, would we know what the data in the barcode represented. That gave rise to what is known as the FACT data identification system that says, ‘if it’s a part number it’s going to start with the letter P, a purchase order will start with the letter K, quantity is Q, and so on.’ It grew much more complicated and structured. Say a shipment arrives at an auto plant with an outside label that has five or six barcode symbols, each barcode would identify what it was by virtue of the leading one or two characters on that barcode. Subsequently, the Uniform Code Council working with EAN decided that we needed standardization. That got us to the point where a barcode today has a manufacturer number combined with its item number on a product—and it’s unique worldwide. It turned out to be a very simple concept with far-reaching implications.
Congratulations, David! This recognition is well earned and well deserved. To learn more about the 2024 Pros to Know awards, head over to Supply & Demand Chain Executive.