![]() ![]() Then and now, businesses have pursued increasingly more sophisticated methods of measuring and managing incoming shipments, raw materials and inputs, finished goods, tools and equipment, and other valuable resources. In fact, it was the only option available until data automation emerged.īusinesses could type up the results, but the counting all happened manually.īut it all comes back to the simplest of tools: pen and paper.įor centuries, this basic toolkit has played a significant role in asset and inventory control for businesses of all types and sizes – from the trading houses of Venice and Hamburg to Industrial-era manufacturing operations. Likewise, this method was more than sufficient when it came to controlling resources used for building all types and sizes of capital goods.Īlthough we typically don’t think of pen and paper as a technology, it is by definition, given its practical application for tracking inventory, with the help of diligent employees trained to monitor and accurately record each transaction.īut for the most part, the pen and paper method is not only time-consuming and difficult to scale, it is also prone to simple errors. For example, a 650 square foot home can be 3-d printed in 24 hours! Given the incredible speed at which things are made these days, paper records simply can’t keep up. It’s certainly possible to count the number of items in a small grocery store, but what about five small grocery stores, or 50 or 1,000?Īnd what about a warehouse for an industrial manufacturing facility, which receives parts and materials every day keeps an inventory of them for expected manufacturing needs and is also sending shipments to the plant daily? Moreover, pen and paper asset tracking becomes increasingly more unwieldy at greater scale. You could use pen and paper, but then you’d have to collate all the ins and outs daily, while double and triple checking the numbers to ensure that they are right. Needless to say, in today’s business environment the problems of scale, data integrity, real-time accuracy, and distance would become instantly overwhelming. So efficiency has largely “written” this method out of existence. The next big asset inventory management system was launched in grocery stores, as they made the transition from pen and paper to a barcode solution.īelieve it or not, barcodes were invented in 1949. The first 1D barcodes were a combination of thin and thick lines representing numbers that a visual scanner could interpret. And, at first, these tracking stamps were round. Here’s a snippet of the original patent application.ĭespite the challenges of pen and paper, it took more than 20 years for grocery stores alone to adopt barcodes. ![]()
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