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Ask Slashdot: Automatically Logging Non-Computerized Equipment Use?
First time accepted submitter Defenestrar writes "I've recently taken a job at a large state university where I manage the laboratories for a couple of departments. We have a good system to pro-rate costs for shared use of big ticket items, but don't have anything in place for small to medium expense pieces which don't require software control (i.e. AD user authentication logs). It is much more efficient to designate a common room for things like water purifiers and centrifuges, but log books have a history of poor compliance. Also, abuse or neglect of communal property has been an issue in the past (similar to the tragedy of the commons).
Do any of you know of good automatic systems to record user/group equipment usage which would allow for easy data processing down the line (i.e. I don't want to go through webcam archives). Systems which promote accountability and care are a bonus, but for safety reasons we don't want the room's door locked (i.e. no pin/badged access). Most of these systems also require continuous power — so electrical interlocks are not a good option either.
I call on you, my fellow Slashdotters, to do your best and get quickly sidetracked while still including the occasional gem in the comments."
Do any of you know of good automatic systems to record user/group equipment usage which would allow for easy data processing down the line (i.e. I don't want to go through webcam archives). Systems which promote accountability and care are a bonus, but for safety reasons we don't want the room's door locked (i.e. no pin/badged access). Most of these systems also require continuous power — so electrical interlocks are not a good option either.
I call on you, my fellow Slashdotters, to do your best and get quickly sidetracked while still including the occasional gem in the comments."
You can easily have the door "locked" from outside, But the room can be easily exited in the event of a power loss (crash bar on the inside door).
UPS Sucks
You hire someone to check it in and out. Honestly unless you put RFID tags on everything and then force them to be passed through a reader before use, you can not automate that stuff.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Adding RFID tags to equipment and encouraging people to swipe it out as it is used might be a good idea. But short of adding a supply clerk or using a badge system I don't see many other options. Maybe there's some work-study budget for a freshman to sit in the lab and check out equipment?
I heard on Freakonomics about putting up web cams and paying someone in a far-off land to ensure hand-washing compliance. Perhaps a system like that might work.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
In cases like this, I create a resource in MS Exchange that can be reserved. Bill against that reservation. It isn't perfect, but after someone gets kicked off by someone who reserved it, they begin to use the system. This makes the guy that pays for usage the prefered user.
Place nail here >+
I was about to post this same thing, but in a different way.
As an Oracle of the Bordland Delphi, I look into my magical book of syntax. I breath deeply the fumes of the mighty Pascalious Flowerus. Your future is very clear. I see a person, at a desk with a book. No wait! Two books!. The person sitting asks people for identification, and validates this against one book. If their name is found, they ask them to sign in to the other book. There is more! The desk sits sideways, so this person not only controls who enters the room, but also asks those leaving to sign out.
This will be as it must be due to your mighty constraints of continual lightning and desire to have doors without locks!
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
To people who haven't worked in labs:
First off, generally the issue isn't tracking usage for the purposes of billing, or actual inventory (ie preventing people from walking off with things.) Most expensive stuff can and is plated and then cabled down to tables. The issue is often more tracking down who screwed up something so they're told not to do it again/given additional instruction, or their lab/PI is billed for the repair.
Why? All manner of equipment isn't cleaned after use, or toxic stuff is used on equipment that can't be cleaned of it easily, or equipment that is shared with other experiments that would be damaged by certain chemicals or contaminants. Centrifuges have the wrong rotors installed or mis-balanced loads, destroying the bearings or worse. Cryo vacuum traps don't get cleaned and can accumulate liquid gas and explode. Microscope objectives get damaged from impacting the slide or overuse of oil for immersion objectives. Microscope light sources get left on and burn out (some of them have lifetimes measured in hundreds or a few thousand hours.) The list goes on.
You can't always control power, because a number of instruments have long warm-up times before they stabilize, or require a bunch of parameters be entered on power-on.
Access control via keycards works until you discover that someone left the lab, dropped off their ID, security for some reason never cancelled their card, and now it's become a shared resource in the lab. This happens so often it's not funny, except in places that take access control VERY seriously, like hospitals that have research groups. Or people swipe others in.
It often really comes down to solving people problems with people, not technology...and having a culture of following procedures and policies. If someone can't follow procedure, lies, cheats, etc - they're a liability/danger to your lab/center/school reputation because they could be (and probably are) doing the same thing in their research. Why are you still employing/collaborating with them? Kick their ass to the curb.
That said, a lot of equipment manufacturers could recognize this need, and provide lockout contacts that can be interfaced with various access control and logging solutions.
Lastly, a reminder to Slashdotters: please think critically about the solutions you offer. If some random guy can think up a "solution", then chances are it's occurred to, and maybe even been tried by, someone with actual experience. At least recognize that possibility...
Please help metamoderate.
The problem is the management structure leading to internal billing sounding like a good idea! Flat rate the costs unless they're really significant and you can't gauge who the users are. Make the flat rate based on 'reserved' units. i.e. a portion of the resources have 'priority' access for a dept. based on the amount the dept. allocated to the budget. They are still shared, but the sponsoring dept. has priority access. Infrequent users use the 'free' equipment or any 'reserved' unit not currently in use. Frequent users can fund additional 'sponsored' units if they need more. While imperfect, it's better than treating each bit of equipment like a rent-way rental.
The AC's idea of an RFID timeclock in the room is great if you must internally bill. A crude measure of usage should work if your office politics aren't toxic. If you really have problems with equipment abuse, you can use a webcam and review it only if there is unreported damage. Review the footage only with a managers approval with public knowledge every time it happens (with penalties for snooping) and you'll make junior NSA drama less likely.
Still, internal billing is very expensive operationally.
So, your university wants to monetize the usage of the basic infrastructure in order to leverage your synergies by applying an undue burden of usage and accounting on the people to more accurately ensure they spend most of their time accounting for the 2 cents it cost to use the device? So you're going to make me waste an hour of my expensive and limited time to account for a few sheckles?
I had a PM once who wanted us to account for our time in 5 minute increments. Then he was surprised that 1 of every 5 minutes was recording what we did the last 4, despite us having told him that is exactly what would happen.
This sounds about as stupid and counter productive.
It sounds like cost recovery run amok, and usually marks the point at which an organization has been taken over by accountants who then work very hard to ensure the real work can't happen.
Sorry sir, I couldn't do any actual engineering/science/work because I was filling out my time sheets in triplicate, filling in the TPS reports, and updating the spreadsheet to indicate that I've done all of those things.
The 'solution' you think your finding is essentially creating a new kind of problem -- and that's one created from institutional stupidity.
My advice? Just don't do it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The "off with their head" method doesn't work because there is always some annoying thing that a company is trying to eliminate and no one wants to work in environment with a huge list of trivial shit that gets them immediately fired.
As to how I'd fix the problem. Have time on the equipment scheduled in advance. Periodic surveillance video spot checks on unbooked spots to make sure no one is sneaking in. Internal billing or whatever you are doing based on the schedule. It's kinda like a log book, but different!
If you go this route, it's important to determine what the penalty is for violators. This is important, because you probably can't just off with their head, and a stern talking to probably won't cut it for repeat offenders. Billing teams caught using the equipment outside of schedule at a higher rate or doing this indirectly by assuming they were there for the entire contiguous unbooked block might work.
This is all true, and in particular, most Universities in my experience (based on a representative sample of directors of research, research support IT types and tame academics like myself at research intensive UK Universities) are incredibly bad at managing the inter-departmental billing. In my institution even for the big-ticket items like electron microscope, the technical support people spend more time chasing down bills than actually supporting users on the kit. Any cost-benefit analysis conducted by people who actually known how a lab works quickly shows the whole thing to be a complete waste of time and money.
Even for catching the idiot users who've broken something it can be difficult to make it pay. So you catch gormless post-doc whose just crashed a microscope stage into a sensitve detector, shorted out the HT and blown several boards in the back of the instrument. What happens - the HR people won't let you recover the costs from the salary (on the grounds that the post-doc would be destitute), the PI whose post-doc it was will refuse to pay because they've not been allowed to factor a charge for gormless post-docs into their grant application. Neither the host department nor the user's department will pay and will dispute liability (on the grounds that your system should have been interlocked against gormless users). You can ban said gormless post-doc from using the instrument again, but that's rather academic as right now nobody can use it all.
In more industrial/manufacturing evironments one can lock down the processes which reduces this sort of mayhem, but in academic research environments that's much harder. If you can keep the userbase small (10 users on any bit of kit) you can jsut about manage to sport the gormless ones before they do damafe, but when you go to larger userbases it just gets to be a hard problem.
Feel free to continue open access, but place a social stigma on using the equipment without recording your use.
For example, imagine that when you sit down at the desk, a light goes on that says "Thanks for logging in" (if you have). Now, tomorrow, you find three other people in the lab who don't have the sign lit. You say "Hey, I can see that you didn't sign in to indicate that you're using the system-- here, let me help you"
Another way to encourage self-policing from the users is to tie maintenance or upgrades to the logged use of the system. Say "Sorry, we're not going to upgrade that oscilloscope because nobody logs that they use it. We're going to spend grant money on the bench power supply in room 6B that has lots of log entries."
Put these two things together, and the people who care about using the equipment will help you keep the other users under control.
--Joe