Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Centralize Visibility Across Departments

Scattered equipment records make it nearly impossible to know what you own, where it is, and whether it’s available. Spreadsheets in one department, paper logs in another, and a separate system somewhere else all create the same problem: nobody has the full picture. Centralizing that information into one system gives staff, faculty, and students the same accurate view of inventory. WebCheckout’s Higher Education solution is built specifically around this problem, giving institutions one system of record instead of several disconnected ones.

Automate the Repetitive Parts of the Process

Manual processes are where inventory management breaks down fastest. Someone forgets to log a return. A maintenance issue goes unreported. A reservation conflict doesn’t get caught until someone shows up to an empty shelf. Automating routine tasks removes the dependency on any one person remembering to act. That includes generating maintenance tickets, assigning technicians, and flagging equipment as unavailable while it’s out for repair. Our Repair and Preventative Maintenance Module automates several of these steps directly, so equipment issues get tracked and assigned without manual triage.

Restrict Access Based on Training and Role

Not every piece of equipment should be available to every user. Specialized or high-value equipment often requires certification or training first. Think recording gear, lab instruments, or maker tools. Building that restriction directly into your reservation system prevents both safety issues and unnecessary wear on equipment, rather than relying on staff to remember who’s qualified. WebCheckout’s Certifications Module handles this by tying access directly to a patron’s verified training record.

Plan for Maintenance, Not Just Purchasing

It’s easy to treat equipment acquisition as the finish line. But the real cost of inventory shows up over its full lifecycle: repairs, calibration, and eventual replacement. Departments that build maintenance and calibration schedules into their process from the start avoid a scramble of reactive repairs later. They also get more usable years out of every purchase. This matters even more given current budget pressure. Getting more life out of existing equipment is one of the more realistic ways to stretch a shrinking budget without cutting services.

Use Your Own Data to Make Purchasing Decisions

Every checkout, return, and repair ticket generates data about how your inventory gets used, not how you assume it gets used. Reviewing that data regularly can reveal which equipment is overbooked and needs duplicates, which items sit unused and could be retired, and which vendors have the best repair track records. We cover this in more depth in our post on CMMS reporting, but the short version is: the data you’re already generating is worth reviewing on a regular cycle, not just when something breaks.

Getting Started

None of these practices require starting from scratch. Most institutions can adopt them incrementally, starting with whichever gap is causing the most friction right now, whether that’s visibility, maintenance, access control, or purchasing decisions. Talk to our team to see how WebCheckout can support these best practices for inventory management in higher education, whatever stage your department is starting from.

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But barcodes have a real limitation: they can’t hold much information. Over the past decade, newer technologies emerged that encode far more data. The shift accelerated in 2003, when Walmart required all its suppliers to adopt RFID tagging.

Even so, most organizations still consider barcodes the most practical way to track your assets. So where does that leave QR codes and RFID? Here’s a closer look at each option, and what to consider when choosing the right way to manage your inventory.

Barcodes: The Original Way to Track Inventory

A barcode is a set of vertical lines and a scannable sequence of letters and numbers. When you scan the barcode, the system returns that sequence, which triggers a lookup in your point-of-sale or inventory management system.

Retailers use barcodes most often, but libraries, hospitals, and time-clock systems rely on them too. Barcodes let you identify an item quickly while keeping inventory and sales data accurate.

Barcodes have stuck around for over 50 years for good reason. They’re fast, accurate, and cheap. They generate little paper waste, and they cut labor costs by reducing manual entry. On the downside, printing and applying labels takes time, and you’ll need to invest in scanners or readers to use them.

Barcode technology keeps evolving, too. Some manufacturers are now developing near-invisible microparticle tags to fight counterfeiting — tags built from materials durable enough to survive extreme conditions and nearly impossible to remove. Industries with high counterfeiting risk are watching this space closely.

QR Codes: More Data for Your Assets

A QR code is a type of barcode, but it encodes data in two directions instead of one — left to right and up and down. That extra dimension means a QR code can hold far more information than a standard barcode, including text, URLs, SMS messages, or a virtual business card.

Manufacturers use QR codes heavily to track vehicles and products through production. Most consumers, though, know QR codes from marketing: point your phone’s camera at one, and you land on a promotion or extra product info.

QR codes have real advantages. They’re versatile, trackable for analytics, and free to generate. Adoption has changed dramatically in recent years, too — roughly two-thirds of consumers report scanning a QR code in the past year, and inventory management has become one of the fastest-growing use cases for the technology.

The applications keep expanding. Mercedes-Benz Canada, for example, places QR codes on vehicles to give rescue teams instant access to structural information — the location of airbags, batteries, and fuel tanks — which can speed up response time after a crash.

RFID Tags: Wireless Tracking at Scale

RFID, or Radio Frequency Identification, reads and captures information through radio waves instead of a visual scan. The system needs just two components: a tag (or transponder) and a reader that communicates with it.

Industries use RFID everywhere, from mobile payments and healthcare to retail, amusement parks, and car rentals. You’ve likely encountered it in retail theft prevention — cashiers deactivate tags before you walk past the sensors at the door. Organizations also use RFID tags to track animals, unlock secured doors, collect tolls electronically, and monitor shipping containers, machinery, and railroad cars.

RFID’s biggest advantage is scale: a single reader can communicate with multiple tags at once, without needing a direct line of sight. RFID tags are small, durable, and tough enough to withstand damage. That said, RFID comes with tradeoffs. Because any nearby reader can pick up the signal, RFID can pose security risks, and someone could remove a tag to bypass a security system. High startup costs remain the most commonly cited downside.

RFID’s applications keep growing regardless. The NFL began tagging players’ shoulder pads with RFID chips in 2014 to track speed, distance, and movement patterns — a move that opened the door for sports analytics as we know it today. Major retailers continue testing RFID’s expanded capabilities, and researchers are even experimenting with implantable RFID tags for uses ranging from secure building access to payment.

How to Track Your Assets: Choosing the Right Technology

Most organizations aren’t moving away from barcodes and QR codes anytime soon, especially smaller teams without the budget for RFID’s higher startup costs. That said, RFID is becoming more viable in manufacturing and retail as prices come down and its advantages in speed and security become harder to ignore.

The right choice often depends less on the technology itself and more on how well your equipment reservation and inventory management software supports it. Whether you’re scanning barcodes at checkout, using QR codes to speed up patron self-service, or exploring RFID tags for high-volume tracking, your system should make it simple to track your assets — for both your team and the people borrowing your gear. WebCheckout’s Patron Portal is built to streamline exactly that kind of day-to-day tracking and checkout process for higher education and media organizations alike.

Talk to our team to see how the right technology, paired with the right software, can make it easier to track your assets and simplify inventory management.

The post Tracking Your Assets: How Barcodes, QR Codes, and RFIDs Can Help Manage Your Inventory appeared first on WebCheckout.

The post ADA and WCAG Compliance: What Equipment Reservation Software Actually Needs to Meet appeared first on WebCheckout.

Downtime Adds Up Where Manual Tracking Breaks Down

Manual maintenance tracking depends on a chain of people remembering things: someone has to notice a problem, someone has to log it, and someone has to assign it to the right technician. In a busy checkout center, any link in that chain can slip, and equipment sits idle longer than it needs to.

Letting Patrons Report Problems Directly

One way to shorten that chain is to stop relying on staff alone to catch issues. WebCheckout’s Patron Portal lets patrons create maintenance tickets themselves as soon as they notice a problem. Staff no longer have to catch every issue during a return inspection. A problem can get flagged the moment someone experiences it, not whenever staff happen to check.

Automatic Ticket Assignment

Once a ticket exists, getting it to the right person matters just as much as creating it. WebCheckout’s Repair and Preventative Maintenance Module can automatically assign tickets to technicians three different ways: based on repair specialty, in round-robin order, or to whoever currently has the fewest open tickets. This removes a manual triage step that would otherwise slow down every repair.

Keeping Broken Equipment Off the Booking Calendar

A subtler cause of downtime is equipment that’s technically broken but still shows up as available to book. WebCheckout solves this directly. When authorized operators take an item offline for service, that offline time integrates with the booking schedule automatically. The item can’t get double-booked while it’s out for repair. That single integration point eliminates a specific, avoidable source of disruption for both staff and patrons.

Preventive Scheduling, Not Just Reactive Repair

Beyond handling repairs after the fact, our software lets departments create maintenance and calibration schedules for individual items or entire equipment types. Scheduled, preventive maintenance is exactly the kind of proactive approach the Department of Energy points to when it comes to controlling maintenance costs and catching wear before it becomes a breakdown, rather than reacting to failures as they happen.

A Full Record, Every Time

Every ticket keeps a complete history attached to its resource: time and labor costs, documentation, and a log of vendors used for outside repairs. That record makes it easier to spot which items break down repeatedly, and which vendors are worth returning to, over time.

Getting Started

If your department is still tracking repairs by memory and spreadsheets, it’s worth seeing what changes when ticket creation, assignment, and scheduling happen inside the same system you already use to manage bookings. Talk to our team to learn how WebCheckout’s Repair and Preventative Maintenance Module can help your team reduce equipment downtime.

The post Reduce Equipment Downtime: Why Automated Maintenance Keeps Equipment Running appeared first on WebCheckout.

A Skill Set Hiding in Plain Sight

Over the last 20 years, thousands of students and staff across hundreds of colleges and universities have used systems like WebCheckout to reserve, check out, and manage equipment for classes, labs, and campus media programs. Some worked the administrative side of the system. Others simply used a self-service booking Patron Portal as students. Either way, they built real, transferable experience with enterprise resource management tools — the same category of software many industries rely on every day.

That’s a signal hiring managers should pay attention to. A new hire who’s comfortable navigating booking workflows, inventory tracking, and equipment policies doesn’t need to learn those concepts from scratch. They just need a quick walkthrough of your specific system.

Equipment Management Software Isn’t Just for Higher Education

Colleges and universities are only part of the picture. Broadcast and production companies, corporate inventory teams, government agencies, and event organizations all rely on equipment management software to run daily operations. They track gear, schedule bookings, manage repairs, and keep costly equipment accounted for.

That overlap matters more than it might seem. Picture a recent grad who spent four years booking cameras, audio equipment, or lab instruments through a campus system. They’ve already practiced the exact muscle memory your team needs: understanding checkout policies, respecting access permissions, communicating clearly about availability, and treating shared equipment responsibly.

What These Industries Have in Common

Whether an organization is for-profit or not, the underlying need stays the same. Teams need booking, billing, repair, maintenance, kitting, and communication to work together, so equipment gets used to its fullest potential. That’s the core problem equipment management software solves, regardless of industry.

Systems like WebCheckout include plenty of features built specifically for higher education, like integration with Student Information Systems and course enrollment. However, the majority of the platform — from scheduling logic to maintenance and repair tracking to reporting — applies just as well to a production studio, a corporate inventory team, or a government fleet of equipment.

Hiring for Software Fluency, Not Just a Job Title

If your organization is evaluating or currently using equipment management software, it’s worth asking new hires directly whether they’ve used a similar system in school. You may find that some of your best onboarding shortcuts are sitting in the room already.

If your team is looking for equipment management software that fits the way your organization actually operates, talk to our team to see how WebCheckout can help.

The post Equipment Management Software: Why Your Newest Hires Might Already Know How to Use It appeared first on WebCheckout.

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Baseball’s shift reflects a broader move away from intuitive decision-making and toward empirical, data-driven decisions. That same shift has reshaped how the best inventory managers operate today.

Why Inventory Management Metrics Matter

An inventory manager’s job is two-fold: making prudent purchasing decisions and meeting the needs of the people who depend on that equipment for academic or project-based work. Both responsibilities depend on reliable inventory management metrics, not gut instinct.

To serve their institution, a manager of circulating equipment has to answer questions like:

• What technologies are on the rise or in decline?
• What are the current trends in your industry?
• What are the repair, training, and maintenance costs for a given piece of equipment?
• How much should you invest in high-priced, cutting-edge technology?

For the people relying on that inventory, the questions look different:

• Are critical items available when needed? If not, why?
• Are shortages caused by too little inventory, ongoing repairs, or a one-time spike in demand?

Measuring customer satisfaction requires both short-term and long-term data — evaluating individual interactions as they happen, and tracking how well your inventory served everyone’s needs over a longer stretch of time. That means asking:

• Were all reserved items available at pickup?
• Did any part of the process — reservation, checkout, or return — create friction?
• Were there long lines when customers arrived to pick up equipment?

Short-Term Inventory Management Metrics

Short-term metrics matter most for serving customers day to day:

• What’s going out today?
• What times will be busiest?
• Which equipment is running low today?
• Will staffing levels meet demand?
• Which upcoming events need advance preparation?

Long-Term Inventory Management Metrics

Long-term metrics serve both your patrons and your institution’s broader goals:

• Do your hours of operation actually serve patron needs?
• Are your policies too restrictive?
• What equipment is at or approaching end-of-life?
• What should be repaired versus replaced?
• What’s the repair and maintenance track record for specific makes and models?
• What can be repaired in-house, and at what cost?

Turning Metrics Into Better Decisions

Just like a baseball front office uses sabermetrics to make smarter roster decisions, inventory managers who track the right inventory management metrics can make smarter calls on purchasing, staffing, and policy — instead of relying on instinct alone. Equipment reservation and inventory management software built around clear reporting makes it far easier to capture both the short-term and long-term data that drives those decisions, from what’s checked out right now to repair histories over time.

If your team is still tracking inventory management metrics manually or piecing them together after the fact, talk to our team about how WebCheckout can help you turn that data into better decisions.

The post Inventory Management Metrics: What Moneyball Can Teach Us appeared first on WebCheckout.

From Collection to Creation

Instead of only lending books, more libraries are lending capability: the tools, technology, and space patrons need to build, record, and create. That shift shows up clearly in the numbers. According to the Public Library Association’s most recent technology survey of over 1,500 U.S. libraries, nearly half of public libraries now offer devices like hotspots for checkout, about a quarter maintain digital media production equipment, and roughly 40% have dedicated maker production equipment on hand.

Academic libraries are seeing the same growth on the ground: Thompson Rivers University’s library makerspace logged over 19,000 visitors between May 2024 and April 2025 alone, with usage climbing every year since it opened.

What’s Actually Inside a Library Makerspace

Ask a librarian what “the collection” means today, and equipment is increasingly part of the answer. Common library makerspace tools now include:

• 3D printers and 3D scanners
• Laser cutters and vinyl cutters
• Recording studios and podcasting equipment
• Cameras, green screens, and video production gear
• Sewing machines and traditional arts-and-crafts tools

These spaces aren’t limited to public libraries, either. Academic library makerspaces have become common enough that they show up in engineering departments, art programs, and increasingly in fields like journalism, health sciences, and business.

The Operational Challenge Behind the Trend

A library makerspace looks straightforward from the patron side: walk in, reserve a tool, use it, return it. Behind the scenes, it’s a different story. Unlike books, makerspace equipment often requires training, certification, or supervision before a patron can safely use it — a 3D printer or laser cutter carries real risk that a paperback doesn’t.

That’s exactly the kind of problem WebCheckout’s Makerspaces solution is built to solve. Its Certifications Module restricts access to specialized tools so only patrons with verified training or completed coursework can reserve them, with expiration dates and supporting documentation attached to each certification. On the maintenance side, WebCheckout’s Repair and Preventative Maintenance Module automates equipment tracking so tools stay in working condition between checkouts.

Why This Matters for the Future of Libraries

The library makerspace trend suggests libraries aren’t fading, but redefining what “access” means. Instead of only lending information, libraries increasingly lend capability: the tools people need to build, record, prototype, and create, often at a cost far lower than buying that equipment individually.

For libraries considering or expanding a makerspace, the software behind it matters as much as the equipment itself. Talk to our team to see how WebCheckout can help your library manage certifications, reservations, and equipment upkeep as your makerspace grows.

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