Infor EAM Huddle | Barcoding

The pace of business and technology continues to increase, yet it’s become harder to retain and recruit workers. In September’s Huddle, “How to Accelerate the Speed of Your Business Transactions with Infor EAM,” we talked about ways to standardize and accelerate the speed of transactions while meeting the needs of your users—because without it, your business may fall behind.

For those who couldn’t join the Huddle, here’s a handy recap—and a link to the video recording so you can watch the whole thing!

Our Speakers

• Jody Costa, VP of Marketing, Barcoding
• Jim Charboneau, Account Director, Enterprise Asset Management, Infor EAM
• Peter Zalinski, Director of Partner Solutions, Barcoding
• Noel McKeon, Business Development Manager, Barcoding

Our partner guest, Jim Charboneau of Infor EAM, started off the conversation by giving the group a sort of “state of the state” of enterprise asset management and inventory management solutions.

His take on things:

• When dispatching workers with handheld devices, you’re looking for them to do the right work at the right place at the right time with the right tools and materials. That’s where barcodes come in; they tell you what asset/equipment they’re looking at, its place in the asset hierarchy, whether or not they’re in the right place, and more. Barcoding captures the data and gets the data quality right
• A barcode makes asset management much simpler because it offers one source of truth (unlike traditional methods like spreadsheets and handwritten logs). Without accuracy, EAM doesn’t work
• Infor’s data structure is most superior in EAM space today, with every aspect of full asset life-cycle management; there’s little need for bolt-on products to be a best practice maintenance user

Notable Quote: A 1D barcode...a 2D barcode, an RFID tag...each of them is really like a license plate that the DMV uses to identify your vehicle.

Some Barcode Basics

Here are a few highlights of a general discussion around barcodes and EAM:

• 1D barcodes are standard; 2D barcodes can hold a lot of information on a very small space and guarantee readability under a wide variety of conditions—they are very durable. They also have the ability to encapsulate automatic identifiers so you can put separate fields and multiple fields in the same barcode
• Use barcodes if you want/need to read things one at a time, and an RFID if you need to read multiple things all at once in a very short time
• If you want unique asset identification, a barcode is usually the preferred way; an RFID can’t analyze one item the way a barcode or QR code or a 2D data matrix code can
• Tags must last in your environment—not only to stick on the product and stay there, but to be readable over time for the lifetime of that asset. For that, you need the right tag material
• The best strategy for EAM is to fit the tools to your purpose; look at your workflow, what you’re trying to identify and accomplish—and pay attention to the user experience. This will help you get the technology part right first, as that’s what will enable you to know where you can go

Engaging Stories

We’ve never had so many stories (and good use cases) shared during a Huddle about the value—both long- and short-term—of EAM. Real-life examples are the best way to learn, so make sure to watch the video recording for all of them. In the meantime, here’s a sampling:

I remember one time when I was in the rail industry; I'd sent a bunch of guys out to repair a locomotive and they saw that a big hydraulic hose had snapped off, so one of the guys made three different trips to the storeroom to find a replacement hose—with no luck. I had to call in one of our suppliers and ask them to make me this specific high-pressure hose with armor on it by one o'clock that same day. I came back on Monday morning to see the work order: the cost of doing that job? $400. I also saw that there were 3 of those darned hoses hung up on a shelf! They were properly tagged, but the guy didn’t know where they were—all they would have had to do was scan it and they would have found it. That would have saved me 5 or 6 hours of overtime and the cost of the hose!

The Future of EAM

Jody asked the panel, “What’s next in EAM?” Some of the answers were:

• “Google glass and AR camera technologies—they’re amazing! The technology is here to do remarkable things. You can get where you want to go if you can think it, invest in it, and enable it.”
• “5G technology, IoT...I see a kind of conglomeration of all these different technologies working together and multiplying to breed new solutions.”

And, The Final Takeaway

Jody asked her famous last question, “What’s the final takeaway here?” There was clear consensus: the panel said that user experience is the key to making EAM work because if they don’t embrace and adopt it, you’re sunk. Other takeaways included:

• Talk to the experts when it comes to EAM and inventory management solutions—don’t go it alone
• Talk to the people on the front line, too—and give them what they want!
• Remember, you need to have standardization in order to have that database integrity

THANK YOU!

Our panel, as usual, was eager and insightful—thank you all for sharing your knowledge! And thanks to everyone who joined the Huddle. Going back to the final takeaway above, it’s important that you rely on the experience of people who live, eat, and breathe this stuff – like Barcoding and Infor EAM. We can help you get the strategy right, and at every subsequent step in the process of deploying an EAM solution.

Click below to get the conversation started about the best EAM approach and technology for your organization!

Soon you’ll see details about our next Huddle, so stay tuned! Until then, watch the Huddle recording to learn more about accelerating transaction speeds.

You might also be interested in learning about mobile device management (MDM)—if so, we’ve got a good resource for you—see below!