By Dick Stark

Last week we received an order from a state agency for Jira Core, Jira Service Desk, Confluence, Insight, implementation services and ScanStar. It was the culmination of a sales process that included a RightStar advisory assessment to determine their needs and design a more modern asset management system. The system, when completed will be a cradle to grave work order and inventory management system equipment and assets requiring replacement or maintenance. A user portal and knowledge management system are also included. This is an excellent use case for Jira and ScanStar for other similar needs. Here’s why:

Efficiency. Providing barcode scanning technology (ScanStar) and a customer support portal (Jira Service Desk) and designing and building an improved workorder process from intake to execution saves times and improves accuracy. (Statistically, a typical typist will make one mistake in 300 keystrokes.  The chance of a scanner mis-reading a bar code symbol is somewhere between one in a million and one in four trillion. The increased efficiency that barcode scanning allows is the reason why ScanStar has such a high ROI.)

Accountability. Improving the service level agreement framework for work order requests allows technicians to better estimate effort and track time spent on work orders. Additionally, using barcoding to receive, check-in, and checkout inventory, improves accuracy and offers a better way to reconcile what organizations think they have with what they actually have

Transparency. RightStar will implement a framework to allow accurate reporting for program level as well as work order level and task level decision making. Enter ScanStar: an excellent fit to their needs. RightStar has years of barcode scanning experience starting in 2005 with MagicWand. ScanStar began shipping in 2011, replacing MagicWand and supporting FootPrints, BCM, Remedyforce, and Remedy.

Now, thanks to the hard work of our development team, new ScanStar for Androids and iPhones is available. No need for a purpose-built scanner, although there are several Android based purpose-built scanners which do work well in a more industrial environment. New ScanStar is Wi-Fi based meaning that the scans and updates are all performed in real-time. New ScanStar supports Remedy, Remedyforce, FootPrints. BCM, AND Jira and Insight. With new ScanStar there is no need for our ScanStar application to run on a server.  Instead, the entire application runs on the mobile phone. 

We still offer classic ScanStar, for DOD secure environments.  There a purpose-built scanner without Wi-Fi or a camera can be used through-out the day to create and update items and then be returned to the office for synchronization when necessary. These scanners have a mobile operating system and can run custom scanning applications like ScanStar, which provide the benefits previous discussed.

The best news: ScanStar for Jira and InSight is now on the Atlassian Marketplace where they are exposed to more than 40,000 Jira Service Desk customers.  Also, all ScanStar products are now available on Google Plays and Apple’s App Store giving exposure to millions.