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Baking Barcodes

One of our customers recently asked us how our standard barcode labels would handle high temperatures. They need to attach the labels to circuit boards which will be briefly exposed to high temperatures. After printing their own labels and experiencing significant discoloration, they asked if we could solve [...]

Choosing the Right Barcode

The barcode has come a long way since the first one was scanned on a pack of Wrigley’s gum in 1974. Today you would be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t know what a barcode is. They appear on everything we buy and we see them on almost a daily basis. Barcodes have expanded in not only use, but in type as well. [...]

The Line Effect - Hidden Costs of Long Lines for Your Business

There are lots of hidden costs to doing business, but one you may not think about is the cost of having your employees wait. Waiting for slow computers to boot up, waiting on slow business processes, or what I am going to focus on in this week's blog - waiting in lines. Waiting in lines is particularly nasty because [...]

5 Things to Keep in Mind When Redesigning Your Website

Your website might be in pretty good shhape, but there is always room for improvement. Redesigning a website is no easy feat and may take you some time and money, but it will be well worth it in the end. You may think that your current website is just fine, but I encourage everybody to make use of this free website grader [...]

Stuck On You - Tips for Applying Barcode Labels

Being in the inventory management business, we run across all sorts of people trying to label all sorts of assets. The biggest problem we see is when people try to print their own barcodes for industrial purposes. abels are fine for standard office supplies, but for long term asset identification, they just don’t cut it [...]

5 Steps to Jump-Start Your Business's Social Life

5 Steps to Jump-Start Your Business's Social Life There is more to launching a social media presence than meets the eye. Through the process of getting Telaeris online with social media, I discovered many things I didn’t know, but wish I had. Knowing even the most simple (and not so simple) things can save you precious time [...]

The Day I Became a SPAMer

The Day I Became a SPAMer Is the function of email changing? It used to be that the easiest way to stay in touch with somebody was by sending them an e-mail. Send them a quick note and often a response would be back in your inbox in under a few hours. However, in my current, I have come to a recent observation. Direct e-mails to people often now require [...]

Facing Off: 5 Things to Consider When Deciding Between RFID and Barcode

Facing Off: 5 Things to Consider When Deciding Between RFID and Barcode Where Will You Be Tracking Items? First, get a handle on where you will be using your barcode or RFID tags. Line of sight is required to read a barcode which can be a good thing or a bad thing. If your barcodes have the potential to be covered with dirt and the elements, RFID may be the way to go[...]

Internet Marketing 101 in a Nutshell

Internet Marketing 101 in a Nutshell I recently had the opportunity to attend the Infusionsoft Customer Tour. For those who are unfamiliar, Infusionsoft is an all-in-one automation marketing system used mostly by small businesses. There are many similar systems out there. We chose Infusionsoft because it provides a nice mix of drip marketing, sales automation, and [...]

XPressEntry Improves Safety and Reduced Paperwork During Turnaround


Southern California refinery benefits from improved safety, increased productivity


When a Southern California refinery chose to implement an XPressEntry confined space entry monitoring system from Telaeris for a refinery maintenance turnaround, they knew they would be improving worker safety. But they didn't know that they would also be increasing productivity from their maintenance contractors and gaining clearer records of work history.


The refinery needed a better way to track entrants for the Winter 2008 maintenance turnaround of their FCC unit, which involved two multi-story vessels (permit-required confined space areas), with a total of thirteen different entryways. In previous turnarounds involving confined spaces, safety attendants had used paper logs to track workers entering and exiting the vessels. However, logging entries on paper is severely limited and so the turnaround project manager chose XPressEntry to overcome those limitations.


XPressEntry improved safety by providing real time occupancy counts for each vessel. Instead of having to radio each safety attendant monitoring an entryway and determine who was still inside, a safety supervisor could simply view the list of current occupants on the XPressTools cart onsite, which was updated each time someone went in or out of an entryway. With the cart automatically calculating how long an entrant had been inside, safety supervisors could easily tell who hadn't exited at their usual time (for a lunch break or end of shift), and could quickly respond to determine their status. XPressEntry saved time for safety attendants and monitors. With paper logs, the safety staff would have to manually reconcile the paper logs after each shift or during an evacuation incident - to determine whether a worker who entered through one manway had or hadn't exited through another. XPressEntry automatically builds the activity history for each worker, eliminating this tedious task entirely, and can provide snapshots of occupancy, for the present moment, or any previous time. The safety staff no longer had to spend time checking and double-checking paper logs - which saves time at the end of each shift, and more importantly, during an incident requiring evacuation.


Worker productivity improved as a result of implementing XPressEntry. With the paper logs, it might take several minutes for a safety attendant to log in a group of workers at the start of a shift. Knowing there might be a wait to get into the vessel, workers were less likely to arrive at the entryway on time. With the XPressEntry handhelds, the time to record entry actions was significantly decreased, reducing the wait - and getting workers on the job sooner.


XPressEntry's reporting functions provided a new dimension of project visibility to the turnaround project manager. Every day, XPressEntry automatically emailed the project managers with a log of all the activity from the previous day's shifts -- which summed up the number of hours spent inside the vessels by each sub-contracting company and their employees. This provided an additional check to make sure that a subcontractor's hours billed matched the hours worked. In addition, reports could be generated at any time to show the activity history by day, week, or month for selected workers, contracting companies, or vessels. This level of recordkeeping was simply neglected under the old paper log system.


From the beginning of the turnaround, the safety staff knew that XPressEntry was going to provide a better management system for monitoring their confined space entries, leading to improved safety and time savings for safety personnel. What they didn't expect were the added benefits of increased productivity and project visibility. There was a time savings for the confined space workers - less time waiting to get inside meant more time on the job per shift, and the projects got completed that much sooner. Both safety monitors and project management benefited from the different reporting features, gaining a clearer picture of the turnaround's progress. With XPressEntry, the refinery was no longer confined to long wait times and poor recordkeeping.