Increasing the 'scan-able' distance on a standard 4x6 for an 18 character barcode

[IrishRyano]

I have reviewed your site and found some very useful information.
Thank you.


We use a standard 4x6 label for identifying our boxes of inventory in
our manufacturing plant. We are using these labels exclusively inside
our plant - we have a different label for boxes that are shipped to
our customer.

We have several wireless laser barcode scanners built by Intermec. I
want to increase the distance that the barcode is able to be scanned
from i.e. currently the forklift drivers have to get off their lifts
to scan each box and I want to give them the ability to scan the boxes
on the floor while still sitting on their forklifts (approximately 9
to 12 ft of scanning range). We have tried increasing the pixel size
however we are constrained to the size of the 4x6 label. Some of our
barcodes are 18 alpha-numeric characters while others are only 8
digits. The 8 digits have not been an issue because of the shorter
length of the barcode, we were able to increase the pixel size to
accommodate scanning from 9 to 12 feet away. We have not been able to
make any headway on increasing the scannable distance of the 18 alpha-
numeric barcode. Any suggestions?

Is this is a symbiology issue i.e. do we need a more effective
barcode?
Any recommended symbiologies to use?

Or is this a hardware issue where a different type of scanner would
make the difference?
Note: we did test a 'long range' scanner however it did not improve
performance much beyond an additional foot or two of scanning
distance.

Your thoughts and advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Ryan