When we started building drum tracking, the plan was what everyone assumes: print a label, stick it on, scan it with a phone. That lasted until we thought about what a used oil drum goes through.
Stickers fall off
Oil, rain, sun and a forklift. A label that looks great on day one is a smear by month six. A drum with no readable number is just a drum, and all the history behind it is gone. Printing the number in plain text under a code helps, but only while the label is still there.
What we do instead
Each drum gets a permanent engraved number. A person reads it and types it or picks it from a list. There's nothing to fall off and nothing to scan.
The software assigns the number from the item type, so a 55-gallon drum looks like a 55-gallon drum at a glance, and nobody can invent one in the field. Scanning came out of the plan altogether.
What the number gets you
- What's in the drum: oil, filters, coolant, rags
- Whose it is: yours or the customer's
- Where it is: at a customer, on a truck, at a base or at headquarters
- How full it is
- Its history, event by event: picked up, dropped at a base, left for headquarters, received
Isn't scanning faster?
When the code is clean and the phone cooperates, sure. Barcodes have their place, and plenty of software uses them. But a driver with oily gloves, in bad light, looking at a worn label, isn't that case. Typing a few characters that are always there beats fighting a label that might not be.
The lesson
Design for the drum in month six, not the drum on day one. See how it fits together on the used oil collection page.