Global Standards

In a world of growing data, GS1 global standards help single out what really matters. They give you a common language to grow, communicate more freely and even reinvent your business.

The GS1 standards are:

  • Global – No matter where you operate, GS1 standards will work
  • Multi-sector – Adopted across different sectors
  • User-generated – Built and maintained through a global, collaborative forum of volunteers from all industries
  • Scalable – Used by organizations of all sizes, from small businesses to multi-nationals

Adopting GS1 global standards helps create a more efficient and transparent supply chain, opening up new opportunities. Global standards give organizations of all sizes access to the same best-practice way of streamlining operations, supporting core business processes and exchanging information with one another, helping you increase efficiency, expand capability and maintain relevancy in an evolving market.

GS1 Canada represents Canadian businesses on global standards-setting bodies. We support the adoption and use of standards such as barcode, eCommerce, and traceability standards. These help organizations to easily identify, manage, share and use data with trading partners.


Supporting Your Organization with Global Standards

GS1 Canada leverages global standards to support business processes across the entire value chain for multiple sectors.

These include:

  • Advertising
  • Contract Management
  • eCommerce / Online Consumer
  • New Item Introduction
  • Order-to-Cash
  • Point-of-Sale (POS)
  • Product Recall
  • Shelf-planning / Planogramming
  • Traceability
  • Warehouse / X-docking

GS1 Standards


Identify
Capture
Share
Use

Identify

GS1 identification standards include standards that define unique identification codes (called GS1 identification keys) which may be used by an information system to refer unambiguously to a real-world entity such as a trade item, logistics unit, physical location, document, service relationship and other entities.

Capture

GS1 data capture standards currently include definitions of barcode and radio-frequency identification (RFID) data carriers which allow GS1 Identification Keys and supplementary data to be affixed directly to a physical object, and standards that specify consistent interfaces to readers, printers, and other hardware and software components that connect the data carriers to business applications.

Share

GS1 standards for information sharing include data standards for master data, business transaction data, and physical event data, as well as communication standards for sharing this data between applications and trading partners.

Other information sharing standards include discovery standards that help locate where relevant data resides across a supply chain and trust standards that help establish the conditions for sharing data with adequate security.

GS1 Canada’s ECCnet Registry supports flexible data loading options such as ProSYNC, GDSN and EDI to ensure supply chain transparency.

Share standards that GS1 Canada supports include:

Use

Businesses can combine different GS1 standards to streamline business processes such as traceability, inventory management, product recalls and much more.