A garment floor in Tiruppur runs on bundles. Cut pieces move from station to station in tied bundles, each one sewn, checked and passed on. The owner wanted three questions answered without anyone walking the floor with a register: who is here, which bundle is each operator on, and what did QC find?
Their ERP was already built by an outside team. What it lacked was the floor: nobody wanted operators typing at a terminal, and an end-of-day register always arrives late and a little wrong. So we built TapIn, a card reader for every station, with one rule: everything is a tap.
A shift, tap by tap
7:58 — the operator arrives. She taps her ID card on the reader at her machine. A green light and a tone: she is IN. The supervisor's phone shows her present, at that station.
8:05 — the first bundle. She taps the bundle's tag. It is now hers, with a start time. When it is sewn she taps it again and it is finished. Her bundle count for the day goes up by one, on its own.
10:40 — QC walks past. A line QC inspector taps his own card at her reader, then taps the bundle he is checking. A check is now open. He looks it over and taps one of three cards he carries: Pass, Rework or Fail. The verdict lands against that bundle, that operator and that time.
6:02 — she leaves. One more tap on her card: OUT. Her hours are already in the ERP, and so are her bundles and their QC results. Nobody types any of it.
What we got wrong first, and fixed
The first version treated every tap the same way: tap once to come in, tap again to leave. That is right for an operator, who stays at one machine all day. It is wrong for QC. A department QC inspector roams the whole floor doing random checks, and under the first rule every second station they badged at clocked them out. Their working day would have been recorded as a few minutes long.
Nobody had hit it yet, because nobody in QC was enrolled. We found it on paper, from the factory's own role list, and changed the rule before it reached the floor: for QC staff, a tap at a different station is a move, not a clock-out. They leave only when they tap out where they are.
The first end-to-end run on hardware found a second one. When a QC inspector badged at a machine, the reader handed the machine to them, and the operator's next bundle tap opened another inspection instead of finishing her own work. A station has two occupants, not one: the operator who is stationed there for the shift, and the QC inspector who visits for a minute. Now the visit ends when the verdict card is tapped, which costs no extra tap on a floor where hands are full.
What happens when something goes wrong
A factory floor is not a lab. Cards get lost, people tap twice, someone taps a bundle before signing in. TapIn never quietly throws a tap away:
- A double tap within a few seconds is ignored, and the reader shows it was ignored, so a nervous second tap does not clock anyone out.
- An unknown card is kept with its number, so it can be enrolled from it later.
- A bundle tapped with nobody signed in is parked and replayed once someone badges in.
- A check with no verdict stays open and visible. It is never passed by default.
- A lost verdict card is blocked in one step from the app, and is refused from then on.
Where the data goes
The readers talk to a small server on the factory's premises, so the floor keeps recording through an internet outage. From there every tap is pushed into the factory's own ERP database as it happens, alongside a live view on the supervisor's phone: who is present, which bundles are open, how many each operator has finished, and what QC has found.
Cards are enrolled by holding them to an Android phone, and a new reader is named from the app. No reader is ever cabled to a PC.
Is TapIn for you?
If your work moves in lots — garments, packing, assembly, a machine shop — and attendance, output and quality still live in three registers, TapIn puts them in one tap. Pricing depends on your stations, lines and QC points and on how your ERP takes data, so reach us for pricing: call +91 75500 58208 or message us, and we will walk your floor first.