BarcodesInc Streamlines Field Inspections and Maintenance

Growmark, an IL based regional agricultural cooperative, offers their clients a safe and effective way to track chemical tanks used in the field to refill sites by means of the HT630 and BarcodesInc customized software.

Executive Summary

Growmark has many clients who lease tanks to farmers to store and spread chemicals for their crops. The clients purchase the chemicals from Growmark and then sell them to their customers. However, Growmark had trouble tracking which chemicals go where and when maintenance needed to be conducted. A lack of cleaning and maintenance could result in the wrong chemicals being mixed, thus producing an unsafe reaction, which would then affect the yield of the crop.

The Business Challenge

Growmark needed a simple application to enable them to track their clients’ chemical tanks that they leased for storage in the crop fields. There were three issues at hand. The first issue was accurately recording the tank identification numbers that were painted on and were now unreadable due to wear and tear from the harsh environments. Secondly, recording the tank locations was a manual process and often done incorrectly. Finally, identifying which chemicals were in each tank at what time was also being conducted manually, but often led to human errors. Each of these issues led to safety concerns and inventory loss.

Solution

Growmark turned to Barcodes Inc to replace the pen and paper data collection process that was resulting in too many human errors with the introduction of barcode labels, a mobile computer, and a customized Barcodes Inc software application. Growmark was supplied with pre-printed black barcodes on high tack polyester labels with ultraviolet (UV) coating to survive harsh environments including chemicals and weather.

Barcodes Inc then created a two-part custom software application that runs on a Unitech HT630 mobile computer to track the tanks as they are being checked in and out of each respective facility. Once the chemical tank was leased to the end-user, the software application on the mobile computer would prompt the user to enter the tank number, location, and type of chemical. This allowed Growmark to account for all of their tanks and have knowledge of what chemicals were residing in each tank in order to identify a maintenance and cleaning schedule for each respective container; thus eliminating any hazardous or safety concerns with the crops.

Benefits

By using the Unitech HT630 and Barcodes Inc custom application, Growmark’s clients were able to adequately track the chemical purchases and locations of their tanks while minimizing human error and safety issues.

The Future

The Barcodes Inc solution was deployed to Growmark’s customers around the world to enable them to track their customers’ leased chemical tanks.