Why Are 80% of Manufacturers in the USA Still Using Paper Forms and Manual Keyboard Data Entry to Track Their Operations?

​​​BellHawk Online is pleased to announce the availability of a new white paper "Economics of Replacing Paper forms with Barcode Scanning for Tracking Manufacturing Operations" by Dr. Peter Green. This white paper is available as a PDF download from www.BellHawkOnline.com.

Over 80% of small to mid-sized manufacturing plants in the USA are still using paper forms and manual keyboard data entry to track their inventory and manufacturing operations.

The labor involved in capturing this data on paper forms and then subsequently manually keyboarding it into Excel spreadsheets or an ERP system is typically equivalent to the time of one to three people at a loaded labor cost exceeding $50,000 per year per person.

In addition real-time automated data capture systems, using technologies, such as barcode scanning and mobile computing, have many advantages, including the ability to:

· View the real-time status of customer orders.

· View the real-time status of inventory and production operations.

· Prevent mistakes before and not after they happened.

· Accurately capture job costs, including labor, materials, machine time, scrap and rework.

· Capture materials traceability data for defect detection and recall minimization.

In this whitepaper, Dr. Green addresses the question of why so many organizations are still using paper forms and manual keyboard data entry to track their operations and not using technologies such as barcode scanning and mobile computing to automate this data capture.

Dr. Green then explains how hidden costs, such as for IT support and consulting services, have previously made implementing automated data capture systems uneconomical, especially for small to mid-sized industrial organizations.

Dr. Green then goes on to explain how technologies such as Cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence, and the use of IIOT devices, as used by online services such as BellHawk Online, can eliminate most, if not all of the hidden implementation costs. The result is that the above benefits are now affordable by all but the smallest manufacturing organization, often with cost savings of $50,000 to $150,000 per year.

Dr. Green is the Technical Director for BellHawk Online and the lead systems architect in the development of the BellHawk software. He received his BSEE and Ph.D. from Leeds University in England, and was previously a Senior Member of the Research Staff at MIT and Professor of Computer Engineering at WPI.

Dr. Green is an expert in the application of technologies such as barcode tracking, mobile and Cloud-based computing to the real-time tracking of industrial inventory and production operations.

The BellHawk software is available as a set of industry-specific packages on a SaaS basis through www.BellHawkOnline.com, for small and mid-sized manufacturing organizations. It is also available for installation by the IT departments of larger organizations on their own Windows Servers in their own private Cloud.

For more information, please contact Karen Andersen at Karen.Andersen@BellHawk.com or call 774-708-9607.

Source: BellHawk