on site rental tracking

[GregB]

Who would find it usefull to track rental kit on and off the shows so that when you leave the venue you KNOW you have everything loaded.

Think in turns of a mobile app to 'rental desk'/'rentalpoint' with the abillity to scan a whole case of kit (e.g. cables) with one point and shoot (RFID?)

Gotta have or not bothered?

[Guest lightnix]

You mean like this?

 

An excellent system, but a bit OTT for most onsite use IMO.

[Stuart91]

Gotta have or not bothered?

 

Weigh up the cost of what you "lose" versus the cost (in both money and time) of implementing a system and jumping through the hoops it imposes for every gig.

 

Plus how far do you go? Tracking high value items like mics and DIs may make sense, XLR cables possibly less so. But I'm most of the value of "losses" is made of numerous small items.

 

Also, I think we "lose" more stuff from lending it to people and it doesn't come back - things like the odd extension lead, phono adapters, etc. etc.

[GregB]

lightnix, yes thats what I'm talking about, surely that's gotta save time and money over regular barcodes and IR readers.

[Pete McCrea]

It costs about £20k to implement IIRC. For a large rental company turning out hundreds of jobs a year then possibly, but we couldn't justify it yet.

 

The kit needs to be handled on check-in: visual checks and prep ready to go on the shelf, so having to scan/tick it in doesn't add much more time to the job.

 

It also takes quite a bit of tweaking to get the system working accurately by all accounts, so I don't think it is something that can be rolled out on the back of the truck to use on a gigging basis. That said they may have refined the system since we lasted looked at it.