Barcodes improve everyone's life. In the supermarket, they keep prices down by providing checkout clerks with (sometimes) accurate prices. In paper-rich businesses like insurance, they keep documents organized. In education, they let teachers find lessons and chuck the transparencies. They may even help the folks who cut your hair learn their craft. Read how.
Barcodes are turning heads in lots of unusual places. Take the education of hair stylists. Pivot Point (Chicago, IL 773-465-0170), a franchiser of cosmetology training programs, is reducing the beauty school drop-out rate by using Pioneer's (Long Beach, CA 310-952-2111) LaserDisc and barcode technology as training tools.
Pivot Point creates lessons on haircutting, perming and coloring, along with people skills, for entry-level students and beauticians. They've put collections of haircuts and styles on laser disc. They've been developing laser disc programs for more than four years, creating 20 customized discs with corresponding workbooks for students. These training materials incorporate barcodes in a novel way.
"All our visual course materials that were once on slides are now on laser disc with some new shooting," says Judy Rambert, Pivot Point's publishing VP. "The lessons are interactive. The four-color student textbook has barcodes that access lessons. When scanned, the barcode reader ýsends' the barcode to a laser disc player and the corresponding lesson pops up on the display. Teachers' manuals are also barcoded with corresponding segments on laser disc."
The barcode reader acts as a remote control for the laser disc player. It can play at full speed or slow motion a small portion or an entire lesson. It even lets students do freeze frame.
The barcodes are made inhouse. Pivot Point assigns a frame number to be put on disc and Pioneer's Bar N' Coder software creates a barcode. "This gives us a lot of freedom. The educators decide what gets barcoded," says Rambert. "It's a great tool in the classroom." During a lesson, students pass a barcode reader around the classroom. They scan the barcode for the part of the lesson they want to see. They're more motivated and involved in the classroom. It also makes the teacher's work more fun -- they like being able to find things quickly.
"The only problem we had was getting teachers accustomed to the technology. They didn't realize how easy it was to use. Initially, the teachers thought of it as a computer -- but it's more like a VCR. They were afraid of the technology. In the beginning, we used pen readers, which were a little tricky to scan with. Now, they have the wide-mouth wands that are really easy to work with."
Pivot Point distributes their course materials to cosmetology schools throughout the country and around the world. They have a network of member schools that purchase the written laser discs and textbooks as a complete package. The laser discs can store three other languages on the sound track.
Their European discs speak English, Dutch and German. Asian discs offer English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean tracks.
Because each instructor has their own styling techniques, barcoded discs give greater consistency to instruction of different haircuts and styles.
Pivot Point chose laser disc over other optical technologies for their highly visual work.
They liked the resolution and picture of laser disc. It was especially good for group presentations in class.
Developing the system was much more complex than it looked. To make sure they got it right the first time, they hired a consultant, Richard Pollak of Merging Technologies (ST. Paul, MN 612-639-3973). He holds a PhD in education. Pollak tailored the system to their needs.
The learning material cost $4 million to develop. Of this, $100,000 was for barcoding. "The hardware and software purchases were minimal," says Rambert. "It cost about $1,000 for each barcode package and about $10,000 for the hardware."
"It's been a great way to recruit students. They are immediately impressed with the technology. We're also saving our teachers' time while increasing the quality of education."
Insurance Company Finds Happiness With Barcodes
American Western Life Insurance Company (San Mateo, CA 415-573-8041) is getting into barcodes big time. To improve customer service, they're using barcode recognition for documents, embedding barcodes in an imaging system for policy documents.
In 1994, they began using imaging to store insurance applications and all the paper generated in the eligibility/approval process. They were looking to save money on floor space, which was being occupied by filing cabinets.
They bought two scanners, one large, high-speed Bell & Howell (Chicago,IL 847-675-7600) one duplex scanner 6338 and a Fujitsu (San Jose, CA 408-432-6333) M3093, and a File Magic! imaging system from Westbrook (Branford, CT 203-483-6666).
On the eligibility side, 125 view stations served accounts receivable. The users were underwriters, accounting clerks, accounts receivable clerks, adjusters and customer service personnel. All view station users can view, but not modify, images. The images are stored on WORM discs in a single Hewlett-Packard (Santa Clara, CA 408-246-4300) 40T optical jukebox.
In early 1996, they brought the claims function online. Then they saw the need to barcode. "The problem was that we would get in claims, scan them, then have individuals index them manually. Clerks had to enter a 21-digit key for each claim -- a claim number and a customer ID number, usually a social security number," says Tom Swayze, American Western's network administrator. "The two full-time employees who indexed them couldn't keep up with the documents coming in. Any mistake entering those numbers could mean losing a claim -- not something you can let happen in our business."
When a claim comes in, they have 10 days to respond. Claims have to be processed within that time. American Western processes 500-1,500 claims a day. "The system works well for high volumes," says Swayze. Batch indexing lets them index about 800 claims in 90 minutes on the NT server.
To create the label, the numbers are entered on a VAX system, which assigns a claim number. Here, if a mistake is made, the document doesn't get lost in space. It's on the system with a claim number and a scan date.
They OCR the entire cover page. When scanned, the claims are automatically indexed by the claim number. They have eight personal label printers.
One glitch they ran across was with the scanners. They had to get the settings just right, with the highest resolution for better readings of the barcodes. They spent $1,200 for the barcode -- they already had the software and terminals.
