Bar code scanners help keep track
of Ulchi Focus Lens participants
By Franklin Fisher, Taegu
bureau chief
Franklin Fisher / Stars and Stripes
Master Sgt. Jim Warner of California National Guard waits for customers at Camp
Henry's joint reception center. On table in front of him are the laptop computer and ID
card scanner that make tracking troop movements easier. |
TAEGU, South Korea — One of the first things servicemembers saw
when they flew into Korea for the Ulchi Focus Lens exercise wasn’t a Buddhist temple
or a mountain ridgeline.
It was a bar code scanner.
And it will be one of the last things they see as they leave.
These days, the military relies on an ID card scanner to help track
its troops as they move from place to place.
Servicemembers arriving at a military reception center insert their
ID cards into the scanner. The scanner reads the name, branch of service, rank, gender,
Social Security number, and blood type, which is then transferred to a spreadsheet on a
laptop computer attached to the scanner.
“It’s simply a quick way for us to grab the data without
manually typing it in,” said Air Force Maj. Mark Gisi, officer in charge of the Joint
Reception Center at Camp Henry, Taegu, for the exercise. “We import it into Excel,
send it to our command-and-control cell, and then they match it to the master
database,” Gisi said.
The system helps the military keep tabs on its people.
“It gives them a snapshot of how many people have reported in
and who hasn’t reported in, and that all of these people are here and ready to go to
work,” said Master Sgt. Jim Warner of the California National Guard’s 49th
Personnel Service Unit. Warner is noncommissioned officer in charge at the Camp Henry
reception center. “It’s real-world information. It’s right now. It’s
not days later.”
Of the hundreds of servicemembers who have come through the center,
nearly 300 of those swiped their cards at Taegu. Others did so on arrival at Osan Air
Base, Gisi said.
The system also helps the reception center staff give incoming
servicemembers information they may badly need during the exercise.
“With the master data base, we process somebody through and they
aren’t sure where their duty station is or their sponsor, or where they’re going
to be quartered” Warner said. “We can tell them, instantaneously.”
The system saves “hours,” he said. “Hours. On this
exercise we’d probably be doing the paperwork, manually. You can imagine sitting here
typing that information into a report manually.
“We’d probably need four times as many people as we have
today. If you wanted to get it done in a reasonable length of time it would take a whole
lot more people. Actually swiping the cards we had probably four people.
“I was actually in the Army National Guard and in the Army for
basic training during the Vietnam period,” Warner said, “and I remember waiting
in a room for hours, waiting for the clerk to type in the forms.”
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