In short
A club outing in the moulins of the Mer de Glace, and back at the car, all the gear is spread out: the members’ and the club’s, mixed together. With EPI Manager, a scan opens the equipment’s record and tells you whether it is yours. And without a signal, the app stays usable.
You can also run an inspection right there in the car park, or log an observation during the outing, … to keep a trace of premature wear (a high fall-factor fall on a rope or a lanyard, a descender pulley to replace, …)
The outing
The moulins of the Mer de Glace are a special kind of caving, practised in autumn. The beauty of glaciers seen from the inside is always striking! It is blue ice, sculpted by water, centuries-old ice that takes us back in time and into a place where we are only passing through.
It means shafts, meanders, and therefore ropes, anchors, … A lot of gear: harnesses, ice axes, carabiners, ice screws… Some of it belongs to the members, some to the club.
The problem: whose is what?
Back from the outing, everyone’s gear and the club’s gear end up mixed together. Nobody knows whose is whose. Some people have good habits and mark their gear: a piece of tape, a dab of nail polish, sometimes an engraving. It works, as long as it is still visible and you don’t have the same tape as your neighbour!
Even so, it happens far too often that gear gets lost, that we can no longer tell items apart, that we go home with gear that is not ours, whether we realise it or not, whether we lose out or not. The result is the same: you no longer have your gear, nor the history of what it has been through. And sometimes it is infuriating.
What a scan changes
Every piece of equipment carries a code (QR code, data matrix, NFC tag, barcode, engraving…). Scanning the equipment opens its record: you know whether it is yours, and you follow its history live (inspections, condition, end of life). Scan search is included in the free version.
Even under the ice
Once the app has been opened with a connection, it stays usable offline: you can record an inspection at the bottom of a moulin, it is queued and then synchronised when you are back (Pro and Club plans).
Tracking your gear is valuable: it does not look like much, “after all, your teammate will tell you, it’s only an ice screw“. But you know everything about the life of that screw: its outing history, its resharpenings, the high-factor falls it may have taken, … The one you are handed instead, you know nothing about its history. And when your life depends on it, the slightest doubt has to be ruled out.
Before you go
- Open the app once with a connection to load your lists.
- Label your equipment before the outing, if needed.
- Create an Outing in EPI Manager and link all the gear you are taking: it will be easier to look for the item that is missing at the end.
- On your return, scan: each item finds its owner again.
- Encourage your teammates to use the app too. Soon it will be possible to exchange gear (personal accounts only), which will let you always follow the life of the gear in your hands, even if it was not yours from the start!
On your return
- open the app and find the current outing,
- scan the equipment you linked, to check that it is really yours and that nothing is missing.
- Once the outing is over and the gear is back at the club or at home, close the outing.
- You can then do a routine inspection: when putting the gear away at home or at the club, after cleaning it, check its condition. That way you are sure to have only tracked and monitored gear on your shelves.
To go further: discover the life record, the signed, verifiable history of every item, and why keep a PPE register.