Encoding: now or later? a.k.a Flows for happy operations

Can you believe we are only just starting our fourth week of both branch RFID functionality? I feel like it's all coming together now and how we used to operate seems like a distant memory that I am so happy to leave in the past. Susie the black box slayer is something that I wonder how we ever lived without! Love you Susie.

As to be expected in the short term, we will continue to stumble across items that are not tagged...especially from any non-RFID libraries with whom we share borrowers. The borrowers will loan the untagged items directly from them and then return them directly to us. This will be short term occurrence, and time does fly - by the end of 2017 (that's only NEXT YEAR folks!) all libraries will be fully RFID compliant, and all of the metros will most likely be on before then (West Torrens is going through the process now and Burnside is about to go out to tender soon). Until then, here is a collation of some encoding tips from our library staff to promote awesome operations for our customers and staff:

• If a customer is returning items and finds one(s) that do not work because they are not encoded, then just apologise to the customer letting them know that there are some non-Unley Libraries items that are not tagged as yet and they can leave the items with you and you'll tag them and take them off their card ASAP. These can then be dealt with on the pod/returns area as soon as you have time. We don't want customers hanging around waiting unnecessarily, nor do we want them to think that untagged items are something wrong with our system.
• Just as before we had RFID, if your STAR shift finishes and you have not dealt with the items you needed to follow up (encoding, mismatch AV etc) then please let the STARers who take over from you know. This doesn't mean you can leave them lying around as long as possible so the next person has to follow up, as always, we all take ownership for sorting out issues in a timely fashion and having our library spaces look as schmick as possible.
• When popping items through a Sort Assistant (a.k.a. Susie), please deal with any untagged or problem items as you come across them. It's obviously up to personal preference how you want to do this (one @ a time as you see them, or wait until you have 3 or something else) but as long as the end goal is that there is no stockpile of items to be followed up once you leave the area, it's all good.
• Some of our casuals haven't spent as much time as us encoding items, or haven't had the opportunity to do it as regularly as we have...so if they need assistance or have questions, please take the time to go through it with them. This will also be short term as the more they know, the more they can deal with on the spot in future. They are a vital and crucial part of the team and spend lots of time STARing and being stars.

If you have other suggestions, please add away in the comments of this post - learning from others experiences and sharing ideas makes us so much better. Go team!