Track Time with Multiple Barcode Scanners on a Computer
- Details
- Category: Blog
- Published: Monday, 25 April 2016 14:10
- Written by Ray White
Using Standard Time® for manufacturing time tracking? Now you can connect multiple barcode scanners to a single computer. Go ahead and connect twenty barcode scanners to a PC and use them to track manufacturing, packaging, and shipping time. All those hours go into a single database where you can instantly see who is scanning, and how much time they have spent today, this week, or this month.
You'll instantly see:
- Who has their timer running right now
- How much time they have worked today
- How much time they have worked this week
- How long each product takes to manufacture
- Where all your manufacturing time is going
Watch the video to learn more about multiple barcode scanners on a single computer.
This video is about using multiple barcode scanners to connect to a single PC and track time within Standard Time®; for manufacturing or other office purposes. It’s not about how to connect a barcode scanner to a PC. You will have to have these connected if you want to track time in Standard Time for multiple users on a single PC. So consider this more of an advanced video that discusses the configuration of Standard Time and time tracking there. Let’s get started.
I have switched back to my screen and I have the TimeLog tab selected. Go ahead and press F4 to bring up the barcode window. You’re probably used to barcode scanning where you would scan things like the category, user name, project, the timer starts you look back in the time log tab and you can see that record. Then scan stop to stop the timer, you can see the timer is no longer running. When you use multiple barcode scanners for a single PC things are a little different. In this case you have to program into each scanner a prefix. A prefix is a series of characters that you program in that are sent from the scanner every time you scan. Let’s click the barcode prefixes button and you can see that I have set up three guns and I have programmed the prefixes into those guns. Mygun1, mygun2, mygun3; you can choose any text you’d like I just happened to choose those but you need to have unique text. So that the software knows which scanner is scanning at any given time. When they scan text they will emit this series of characters every time. Every time you scan you will get the prefix that comes out. You’ve probably noticed that down below that there are some defaults that you can select. Whenever this prefix is scanned these defaults will be chosen. Let’s say you have a gun that’s associated with a certain user only; you don’t want to have to scan that user because this gun is always for that user. Go ahead and select a user, same thing with project. If this gun is associated with a certain project you can program that in. Same with tasks or categories, all these prefixes can be set up with default values. In this case we have a gun that is set up with not enough default values to start the timer. We would have to wait for more information from the user. Let’s click OK and go over, scan some text and see what happens.
I’ve scanned, you saw the prefix and the text go into the window up here. And in this case I scanned a user named Dan, it’s waiting for some more information. I’m going to scan some more information with gun1; in this case the timer actually started because it had all the default information it needed. I’m going to scan with a different gun, you see that in the list, you also see that the timer started for that one too. For gun3 it’s still waiting for some information, let’s give it a category, then a project; now the timer has started. That is a way for you to set up prefixes that would be associated with scanners and be able to use multiple scanners on single PC. There is one thing to consider here, the end users should probably see or have line of sight to the video monitor that they are working from.
Watch this video: How to start a timer with a bacode scanner, Part 2: Barcode scanning for manufacturing, Part 3: Barcode Timers, Start and timer with an RFID tag reader, Start a timer with a mag card reader
Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR1qf1tRA5Q
