EVALUATION OF THE EFFECT OF A QR CODE-BASED DIGITAL INVENTORY SYSTEM ON INFORMATION SEARCH TIME AND DATA ACCURACY OF ELECTRICAL WORKSHOP ASSETS

Laboratory staff in vocational workshops spend time every day answering simple questions about items, such as whether an item is available, where it is stored, and what condition it is in. This study evaluated how strongly a QR Code-based digital inventory system affects the time needed to obtain such information and how well the system records reflect the physical stock. The evaluation took place in the storage room of the Electrical Workshop of Medan State Polytechnic after the system covered 50 item types. Twenty items from several categories were each retrieved twice, once with the previous document-based procedure and once with the system, so that each item acted as its own control. All 50 records were also audited against the physical items. The data were analyzed with descriptive statistics, the Shapiro–Wilk test, a paired t-test, the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, and a sensitivity analysis without the two unlabelled items. The mean retrieval time decreased from 139.0 s to 49.6 s, with a mean saving of 89.4 s per item (95% CI 78.2–100.6 s; t(19) = 16.74; p < 0.001) and a relative reduction of 64.3%. All 20 items were faster with the system, and the reduction remained 65.3% after excluding the unlabelled items. Record accuracy reached 94.0% (47 of 50). The system therefore delivers a large and consistent time saving for routine asset queries, while items that cannot be labeled require separate handling.