Starting out your day filling out a redundant useless form

Many of my days at work start with checking out a helmet from a small office for FOD (foreign object debris) walk-down. Just imagine making a line and walking an area to pick up “trash” like the Boy Scouts do to a campsite. But while that may sound frustrating to do day in and day out, it’s not the frustrating part. The frustrating part is the checkout. There is a form that you must fill out with the checkout date and time, your name, your signature, and the helmet (actually “your helmet” because everyone has their own). Then of course, you also have to sign back in with the time and date, your name, and your signature. What’s more? The same people do this everyday at the same time. It’s not like you don’t know the majority of who’s going to show up. Now imagine around 20+ people all trying to checkout their helmets at the same time in this small office. You can barely get in or out of the door. It’s a classic process bottleneck. One day I walked in and there was a refreshing sign of improvement. The lady working in the office, who’s almost never busy at this time, had pre-filled out the date and time since it’s more or less the same for everyone. Checkout speed doubled. But how long did this last? Less than a week. There’s got to be a better way. Of course, technology offers many attractive solutions. My favorite is RFID. The helmets would have a small RFID antenna and when they pass through the door, they get scanned. Simple. Elegant. No one would have to fill out anything. But alas, that would take an act of congress. But what could be done, and what I’m proposing next week is that we make a new form because we can’t not have a form. But this form will be different. It will just require two signatures. One when you check out and one when you check in. All the rest of the information will be pre-printed on the form because it isn’t variable enough to not be. If it flies, it’s a stupid simple improvement. But then again, those types of improvements tend to be the best. Keep it simple stupid.