Trade going beyond national boundaries and reaching an international dimension, the increase of fluctuation in product demand, the increase of customer expectations has brought about the need to generate new solutions to boost the efficiency of the supply chain.

In accordance with these changes in trade, in 1974 manufacturers and distributors from 12 countries have participated in the works to constitute a standard fort the identification of the products in Europe; thus in consequence of these works the International Article Numbering (Originally European Article Numbering, which has been changed to International Article Numbering although the abbreviation remains as EAN) Association whose center is located in Brussels was founded in the year 1977.

The basic task of EAN is to develop international standards suitable for every sector which can define products, services, transportation units and inventories in order to provide efficient supply chain management. Local organizations which are members of EAN are obliged to apply and develop international standards in their own regions.

Over time, EAN’s member profile has gone beyond Europe and has spread over the world, thus in 1992 EAN was given the name International. In the 2000s The International EAN Association’s basic goal has gone beyond simply the creation of definition standard and much greater targets were wet.

In order to fasten and increase the efficiency of the communication among the manufacturers and the customers and to provide tracking of the products within the supply chain, projects like GDSN (Global Data Synchronization Network), RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) and tracking were developed.  As a result of the fact that EAN International no longer appears as an organization which only creates defining standards its name has been changed at the beginning of 2005 as GS1. Today, GS1 has 101 member organizations representing 103 countries.

Barcode NUmber- GTIN (Global Trade Item Number): Is the number which serializes products worldwide and is comprised of 14 digits at most. The Global Trade Item Number is given by GS1.