I Shall Call it Ronald

Here's the story I teased a couple of posts ago.



Something new they're doing at my work, on the second floor of the bins, in the blue bins only. They say its experimental at this point, but with a few minor adjustments I foresee it happening for the whole department. They've given us ray guns!!! They're pretty cool. Instead of doing a "batch" of several documents containing 5 to 8 lines to fill for every filler every five minutes, they've switched to doing on big slew of lines every five minutes, and letting the fillers take what they think they can fill.



Each document has a little bar code on the bottom, and you scan it with your ray gun before filling it. This works out good, because if you take a document that you know is going to take more time, you can take less than you normally would. If you take one that turns out to have a difficult fill, you don't need to stress about another batch coming out in a couple minutes, and let the rest of the crew pick up the slack. They say our productivity in that area has increased. I don't know how they can say that, because we always pretty much fill all the orders that come in every day. How can productivity be up if we don't have more orders??? That part I don't understand.

The guns are pretty cool, though. They are wireless, lightweight and nicely designed. They use a small rechargeable battery pack that goes in like a magazine. Lock and load!!! The beam it shoots is a horizontal red beam, and after it registers, it not only beeps, but it shoots a green dot beneath the red beam, and the back bottom and top glow green. If it does a read that doesn't transmit, it makes an electronic donkey "hee haw" sound effect. The supervisors assure us that they store the information and transmit it once they've got reception, but we're all a little iffy about whether that actually works. One of the girls was saying they should issue us shoulder bar codes, and if you can zap a fellow filler on the move you get extra points. I like that idea!!! In the future, they plan on implementing a system where the totes we send down the line will have bar codes on them, and after filling an order, you scan the large bar code on the document, then the tote and send it on it's way. It will know where to go. Amazing.