An application for the tracking and administration of work tools

Sammanfattning

At a logistics company, hand scanners (work tools) were distributed and collected to/from employees by a clerk at a check-out desk. This was, importantly, done in a rapid manner. Basic information such as when and by whom a scanner was used was saved in Excel spreadsheets. Tracking problems such as damaged or missing scanners was very inefficient and difficult. Additionally, there was no way of keeping track of the scanner inventory as only scanners physically present at the bay could be accounted for. The problem formulated is whether it is possible to build a system that both allows for the rapid distribution and collection of hand scanners whilst providing usage history tracking and inventory functionality. This thesis describes the design and implementation of a web application that solves these problems. Problem formulation began with the examination of the old system in place, followed by the investigation of similar preexisting systems. From the gathered data, a central Use Case and accompanying Flow model was designed. A web application was implemented according to functionality defined in the models. The application was developed to facilitate the common rapid distribution and collection workflow, retaining the same speed as the old system. Three pages were created to deal with usage history: a scanner page, an employee page, and a scanner event (a scanner’s usage history was made up of a set of events) page, all providing different perspectives on usage tracking. Inventory functionality was added through a scanner overview page, which provided information about the scanners as a whole, as well as showed basic information for all scanners abiding to given search criteria. The implementation solved the problem. Software testing and user tests were left as future work due to time constraints.