I have looked around the web and been unable to find anything that applies to my problem, bookmarks. I work for a business that does sales at schools. Displays of bookmarks come back often in complete disarray after being pawed through by the kiddies.
My question is this, are there machines capable of sorting hundreds of different book marks which are identical in shape and size but have different artwork. There are no bar codes or UPC’s on them. They have a “design number” but it is not in a consistent position or place. I have done some web searching but didn’t find anything except lots of stuff for sorting different size bolts and such.
Even if the machine/equipment/software is expensive we are talking about a manual sorting task that takes about 150-200 man hours a year x 84 facilities = 12,400 man hours per year. If a machine could handle the sorting in half the time a $50,000+ per year savings would easily result even after shipping costs to and from a central location.
Isn’t this what the post office uses? I mean, just think of the millions of different types of handwriting, positioning, and colors they sort. Certainlly most PO’s don’t do that by hand…
I used to work for a company (now bankrupt) that did the kind of thing you are talking about. It’s feasible technologically. I think the problem is the cost. You’re looking for a savings of $50,000/year. $50,000 is not a lot of money in the product development world. It might be better to adapt your bookmarks to existing machinery than the other way around.
I hadn’t thought of the PO stuff since its doing OCR but then again a picture is still a picture, would probably just be a matter of teaching it that picture A = Bin A
Thank you Zipper, I will do a search for postal type sorting.
Thank you also Mary, I was operating under the assumption that it would be an adaptation of existing technology I was just trying to be cute with the “can we build it?”