Seeing the light

Image

 Background

Concerts, festivals, and corporate events can mean big business and organizers pay top dollar to ensure everything goes well. They turn to specialists in their respective fields. Specialists like R90 Lighting. As the largest lighting design firm in Washington state, R90 Lighting specializes in stage lighting designs featuring the latest in LED lighting technology for concerts, festivals, and corporate events.

Opportunity/Challenge

With a lot of expensive equipment coming and going regularly, there is a high probability items will get left behind or go missing. Rapid growth over the years exposed some shortcomings in R90’s manual asset tracking system. They needed a better way to track their inventory.

R90 case study
Download case study

James McKenna, Operations Manager at R90 Lighting, researched, selected, and implemented an inventory management system which gave the organization more insight into their inventory and they realized how much they were losing because of attrition and inventory disappearing.

Items McKenna and his team needed to track ranged from lighting consoles to cables so, after a quick internet search, he sought guidance from IA-based Metalcraft. Metalcraft is a manufacturer of custom identification products including barcode labels and RFID tags.

Solution

With the help of Metalcraft Inside Sales Rep Tonya Ristau, McKenna and his team selected Premium Polyester Barcode Labels for most of their assets. “Tonya’s been wonderful to work with. She’s handled everything we’ve thrown at her,” said McKenna. With all the cables, lights and different kinds of equipment that needed to be tracked there may be a need for different types of tags. “We didn’t want to have to learn about what labels would work on what surfaces,” he said. “We just wanted something that would work for us.”

McKenna liked the durability and the flexibility of the Premium Polyester Labels. For more specialized applications, i.e., cables, they used the Barcode Cable Label which easily conforms to wrap around the cables while the clear portion of the label protects the barcode and printing.

Labeling clear lenses presented another potential issue, but Metalcraft was up to the challenge and recommended a clear label – allowing easy identification while being unobtrusive and looking professional.

Result

McKenna states while they could have gotten barcode labels with the software they were using; they didn’t want to take on that aspect of the application. “We let you guys handle the labels so we can focus on what we do best,” he said. “It works great because you guys have seen it all.”

To learn more about our asset tracking solutions, contact us today at [email protected].

Download this Case Study