After having sat on the fence for a while I have finally decided to make the jump and tag all of my PPE with DMM’s ID kits, combined with the Papertrail app.
I have been wondering about this for a while now, but was unsure as to whether the way I use my gear was suited to this kind of tracking. However, having spent some time with the folk of Papertrail at TCI Expo and having spoken at length with Rob at DMM about it, I am very impressed by the depth and flexibility of the system – and decided to give it a crack.
For those of you not familiar with it, Papertrail is a cloud-based app that allows you to catalogue your PPE, giving you access to the full history of any tagged piece of equipment in the field, including instruction manuals, technical spec and safety warnings. It integrates with all of DMM, Teufelberger and Petzl products, with other manufacturers being added to this list. You can export it to a number of formats, for example Excel.
The Papertrail app also integrates seamlessly with DMM’s ID, which uses a range of RF chip formats to label equipment. But it is not specific to the RF/ NF technology, it can also work with QR codes, so this makes it very much future-proof.
I reckon I know what I am going to be doing between Christmas and New Year, tagging myself into a stupor, getting spinny on epoxy fumes 😬
I will keep you posted on how this goes for me… the RF ID part, not the glue sniffing part. That is a bad idea, as everybody knows.