Adventures In Barcoding

Peggy and I have been discussing many aspects of the children check in/out process and speed and efficiency is a paramount to this. The current system that the church has will not scale . . . so we're looking at introducing some concepts and things that will certainly appear to be overkill for our size now. One of the things that is on the forefront of thoughts is the accuracy of who goes where and when. If we just have a number attached to a child, will someone be diligent in checking that number? If they're not, then the whole system is just a hollow facade of warm fuzzies that offers no more benefit then our current "grab a snowflake" one.

Once upon a time, I worked at Xerox and it's kind of amazing to see (at that time) the level of operations that existed. My first task there was to design an inventory control system for paper going out on our production floor at the Xerox Business Services unit here in Kansas City. At the time we had no idea of what we had in stock, how quickly it was being used, or anything. There would be reams and boxes of paper just sitting for years before being cleared out and tossed. To put it in perspective, Xerox at that time didn't even barcode their own paper inventory. When the paper was delivered to our facility we had to go in and print our own barcode labels and stick on the various paper boxes. Then when the paper would leave our storeroom we would scan it out, that way we could track how it was being used and estable reorder levels. It was pretty cutting edge technology back then . . . in 1993.

Getting into the barcoding thing also led to another first for our office, and that was meter readings for machines via a portable bar code reader. We had one facility management client with a lot of Xerox machines spread over a wide range of locations. The old way was to write down the serial number, or match the serial number on a list/clipboard arrangement and write the ending meter reading. That information would then be manually input into a spreadsheet. You can only guess the mayhem that would ensue with that system. It would literally take over 3+ days to get all the machines final month end meter readings. I found a portable voice prompting barcode scanner that would allow us to affix a barcode label with the serial number and then input the meter reading via the keypad. All those scans/inputs could then be downloaded via a CSV file into our system to match up the meter readings for that month. Talk about time savings! (Alas, I never saw the spoils of time savings in monetary form!)

So that leads me back to where I'm thinking we should go with the new system. One way or another, a hand scanner and bar coded labels for the parents/children would be used to get them in/out as quickly as possible. With 30-50 students right now it will appear like total overkill, but add another zero on those numbers and suddenly you have a HUGE time savings. Most importantly peace of mind on following procedures will be the best thing. My hope and prayer is that all of this is to never have to use it for the intended purpose of getting the kids information in an emergency.