Back in 1998, I built our company's first tester system that used a laser barcode scanner to track production parts. Upper management loved how parts could be quickly traced through the plant. Quality loved it because it eliminated a lot of hand-written notes.
The scanner cost $500 then, which would be about $1,000,000 now (or a little less). Today, I could buy that barcode reader for $150 ... if they would let me. But no. That would go against our new company motto: "You can't make money if you have to spend it."
Not a problem. Last month, we still had to build a tester that would read bar codes. So we did the next best thing. We took an old, obsolete web cam and wrote a program to convert the bar code image into text. TA-DA! As of last week, the investors and upper management are making mo' money, mo' money, mo' money ... as long as you don't count the hundreds of hours we spent developing the system from scratch. Because that's just good business sense not to!
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