Resource Loci in the Enterprise Barcode

Systems Economics Lexicon · Resource Loci & the Guide to Classification

Chapters 4 and 5 built the vocabulary and grammar for describing what a resource is and what it does. This is where that vocabulary gets put to work inside the barcode itself — tracing not just that a customer uses a product, but precisely what role it plays once they do.

Product tiers: the barcode’s resource-tracking unit

A product tier is the set of three loci that together describe one instance of a product’s use: a Constituent Resource Locus, a Final Resource Locus, and a Work Group Locus. There are four product tiers in the Enterprise Barcode — two in the Customer Section, two in the Customer of Customer Section — each tracing a product’s use one level further down the chain than the last.

Which loci actually get filled in depends on what kind of product the enterprise provides. If the product is a constituent resource, the barcode captures its own function in the Constituent Resource Locus, then captures the function of the final resource it’s incorporated into in the Final Resource Locus. If the product is already a final resource, only the Final Resource Locus gets filled in — there’s no earlier stage to trace. And since activity products aren’t resources at all, neither resource locus applies to an AP enterprise; product-use coding for those starts at the Work Group Field instead.

Why resources need their own tracking system

This structure exists because resources genuinely behave differently from activities inside a customer’s operations. An activity product gets used directly — the enterprise essentially takes over a work group inside the customer’s system. A resource product gets incorporated: it becomes part of something else before that something else gets used, and a barcode that only recorded “customer uses product” would lose exactly the information that makes resource products interesting — what they actually become. Tracking both the constituent stage and the final stage is what lets the barcode distinguish a company that sells finished furniture from a company that sells the lumber that becomes furniture, even though both companies might describe their customer the same way in conventional terms.

This is also where the barcode’s classification logic starts compounding on itself: the Final Resource Locus of one product tier can itself be the input to a Work Group Locus describing an entirely different activity, which is exactly the mechanism that lets a barcode trace a product multiple steps into a customer’s operations rather than stopping at the first point of contact.

See also: Constituent Resource Locus and Final Resource Locus · Constituent Resource vs. Final Resource

Part of Resource Loci & the Guide to Classification, course 5 of 7 in the Locus Theory series. For the full term-by-term specification, see the Lexicon.