>Hi Everyone,
>
>For a manufacturer or metal parts, I need to register job information for each employee.
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>In more detail I require the job number the employee id number, the machine/procedure number the time started, the time completed, and the total quantity of items produced/completed, for every employee for every job on the production floor. There are almost 45 employees at three different sites, for the same manufacturer.
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>The job's come from a purchase order entry module.
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>I am considering barcode scanning. Does anyone have a cost effective idea on how to gather all this information, preferably using barcodes on employee id badges, withour adding to many computers to the production floor?
>
>Thanks in advance!

I've worked with a system at a hospital, where bar coding is used to record information about procedures performed on patients. Each practitioner has a printed page of bar codes representing their patients, the procedures they do, and time units. As they perform tasks during the day, they use credit-card sized portable bar code scanners (Videx TimeWands, www.videx.com) to record information about the work they've done. At the end of the day, as they walk out the door they insert their TimeWand into a recharger/downloader unit. Overnight, a single central PC downloads all the TimeWands and batch processes the transactions back to the enterprise database. Errors and exception reports are generated and routed to the correct people.

The Videx TimeWand I currently lists for US$298 (according to their site), but I believe there are significant quantity discounts.