CIO Technical Series - Solving Scan Gun Performance Issues

I've been very fortunate to work for many different sized companies in many different industries.

Along the way I have discovered a very long list of common business problems including those

that can impact a retail stores operations and shipping and receiving departments in

Manufacturing and Distribution. Does your department have issues quickly checking materials

into inventory in receiving area, scanning materials into production for processing and checking

materials out to be shipped?

Have you ran across these problems or continue to currently struggle with them in your shipping

and receiving areas or retail environment? The cause of these issues can be possibly due to an IT

or data processing issue that is easily solvable. At minimum questions should be posed regarding

the points below to your IT Leadership Team to see if they can help solve the issues or as a

preventive measure to ensure that you don’t have these problems occur in the future.

Check with your IT Leadership Team and ask if they have:

Updated the individual scan guns software and firmware.

Updated the network switches and routers that provide the scan connection to the back-end

servers.

Updated the servers that the scan gun application are running on with firmware and system

patches.

Checked to see if the memory and CPU utilization reach capacity at certain times during the

day on the scan gun application and database servers.

Setup system performance reports to run on a regular basis for all components that provide the

scan gun service.

Updated the scan gun application database with the latest patches.

Tuned, defragged, indexed and archived the scan gun application database on a regular basis.

Built a mirrored database that allows reporting to be run off of instead of the main production

database.

Checked the data storage platform for capacity and reliability issues.

Checked the scan guns to ensure they have the correct time and date.

Ensured that adequate logging is turned on for all the system components that provide the scan

gun service.

Ensured that log files are audited on a regular basis for all components that provide scan gun

services.

Ensured that there are sufficient SLAs for uptime of all components of the entire scan gun

service.

Validated that security vulnerability scanning has been ran against the scan guns application

and all systems that provide the time keeping service to ensure there are no compliance or

security risks.

Setup automate updating of systems that provide scan gun services.

Ensured sufficient wireless signal strength in the area that the scan guns are being used.

Documented the end to end process for scanning to see if there are possibly bottlenecks or long

wait times at various multiple points in the scanning process.

Ensured the scan guns are optimized for data using the Wireless Software Application Client.

Configured the scan gun wireless profile for CAM mode. This will provide the best network

performance but may impact battery life.

Changed the power setting of the scan guns to make sure they don't time out after inactivity

within 10 minutes. Sometimes the guns will lose connectivity due to inactivity timeouts.

Trained staff to keep the scan guns placed on dock chargers when not in use so they stay fully

charged.

Summary Slow scan gun processing is an easily solvable and common problem for many retail,

manufacturing and distribution operations. Asking the right questions to your IT leadership can

possibly go a long way in helping to resolve these issues.

Bruce McCullough High Performance * Leadership * Results https://www.linkedin.com/in/brucemccullough