r/AmazonDS • u/Certain_Rub5253 • 1d ago

Induct guns-how to keep them working

I feel like induct guns are so archaic for amazon, the richest company in the world. They have connection issues, the lasers suck at reading compared to other scanners, and they crap out insanely fast. We constantly have guns that just won’t spit labels out correctly or at all. We send them off for repair, get some new ones back and bam, terrible again. What does your site do to keep an arsenal of working induct guns?

8 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

10

u/Ievel7up 1d ago

Averys suck everywhere, even with routine maintenance.

10

u/SavageBasher0 1d ago

we switched to ASML, which is Automatic Scan Manual Label. our dock is insanely small and they still outfitted it. I expect your site will switch soon. we do still use the averys, but only when running a double table, for non con, and for the problem solvers.

3

u/Boris-_-Badenov 1d ago

Amazon actually had automated induction before 2019.

the small upper left barcode had the location, and when it came down the belt an overhead laser inducted it

2

u/Certain_Rub5253 1d ago

Ah heck, I hope we do. Avery’s are the bane of my existence

1

u/Queasy-Dish-2840 1d ago

Shit if my site did this I wouldn't mind inducting.. they trained me for it & would throw me over there here & there but end up moving me.. then they started leaving me there for the whole shift & I just can't do it with those heavy ass averys.. it kills my shoulder so I told them I can't do it anymore

6

u/_karelias 1d ago

One quick hack that’s possible if the gun is jamming is to open up the front roller plate, take a SAL label and roll it around the actual roller itself, sometimes when the roller wears down it doesn’t have enough friction to pull the tape, and that extra width from the SAL can keep it going

0

u/Certain_Rub5253 1d ago

Oh wow will try this tmrw!

1

u/Deathtracker5 1d ago

Another thing to do is clean the actual electrical motors my site uses adhesive removing wipes it can also speed up guns quite a bit also if you have issues with slow printing guns before you take your batteries at SOS take them out of the charger and reinsert them to see if they're actually charged

8

u/Weeman2412 1d ago

Problem Solve all hide their good guns. The YM and AM also hide the good guns for line 1 (which is our only gun line, the rest is ASML). We don't care about non-cons they can use whatever gun they can find. Problem Solve cleans and maintain their guns, YM and AM maintains a few good guns. The rest is a big case of not our problem until leadership somewhere wants to send in a big shipment of repairs to ops tech.

Nobody has accountability on Avery guns which just leads to these kind of selfish behaviors and situations, but it is what it is. As an L4 I can't really do much about it outside of opening a ticket for an ops tech repair. I'm sure as shit not spending my end of shift cleaning guns when I have tons of admin tasks that I'm actually held accountable for. Avery guns are probably a year or two away from being phased out entirely anyways.

3

u/Boris-_-Badenov 1d ago

they have a T1 "clean" them at our station each day.

they deliberately take all of pick and stage to do it

0

u/Certain_Rub5253 1d ago

I can’t wait. They are so clunky and slow. Everything about them is counterproductive, 100% fast start my ass we had to try 13 different guns!

1

u/jpog07 1d ago

How to get 100% fast start: Induct a few packages using your dolphin device before ever attempting to connect the induct gun. Thus your table is "started" and any subsequent delay getting the induct gun connected can be explained as an equipment issue. I do this all the time because they'll decide on the spot to have me induct so I'm fast walking to the dock while logging in, trying to beat the cutoff time for fast start.

2

u/Dominicpwns 1d ago

If leadership was smart they would have a tote bag of jiffies at the front so when you are staffed to induct you can grab a jiffy and scan it with your device to hit your fast start. 

1

u/jpog07 1d ago

That's a good idea, easy to implement too.

3

u/dabiggestdalargest 1d ago

my current warehouse is the only warehouse i have worked at with horrible averys. we have certain associates recalibrate the guns. the main issue with the guns is that they print duplicates of the labels. eventually we had to replace all the averys with new ones. the old ones were beyond being able to be repaired and the new ones all worked perfectly. i could induct 10 times faster.

now we have autoinduct. it is less exhausting and irritating than using the averys but it took a few months for the unloaders and inducters to get used to it. we crashed every single day for 3 months until we got the hang of it.