SPEEDING UP THE LUNCH LINE

Mar 1, 2005 12:00 PM

Once the purview of the FBI and criminal investigators, fingerprint technology is now being used at colleges around the nation for everyday applications related to students' breakfast, lunch and dinner.

College food service operations are speeding up lunch lines and increasing profits using fingerprint scanning technology instead of card readers.

Campuses such as Westminster College in Salt Lake City and Campbell University in Buies Creek, N.C., are adopting fingerprint scanning and identification systems to speed up the flow of traffic and to increase profitability at their food service facilities.

“From 450 students per lunch using a card system, we now serve 640 people a day with our fingerprint system,” says Doug Rumbold, food service operations and productions manager at Campbell University. “The system has made us more profitable, and was one of several factors that led to our deli tripling its sales in one year.”

Privacy is not an issue, according to Mitch Johns, president of Food Service Solutions, the company that implemented the fingerprint solution at Campbell University. Johns points out that the system does not store any fingerprint images in its database, but stores only mathematical algorithms that cannot be used to recreate fingerprint images.

“Parents and students can rest assured that the fingerprint images cannot be used by law enforcement for identification purposes,” Johns says.

In the past, students received an ID card and a meal card that could be swiped through a card reader in the meal line. However, this method of identification can sometimes be slow, and students frequently forgot their cards, thus causing delays.

With a fingerprint system, students no longer need to hunt through their pockets to locate their cards. They place a forefinger on a small fingerprint reader by the register. In seconds, the system translates the electronic print into a mathematical algorithm, discards the fingerprint image, and then matches the numerical output to the student's meal account information. The Food Service Solutions software, for example, plots 27 points on a grid that correspond with the fingerprint's ridges to achieve a positive identification.

Fingerprinting is voluntary and is typically done at the beginning of the semester along with the enrollment paperwork. Colleges that have implemented such a system report only a handful of refusals. In these cases, students have the option of using a traditional card swipe approach.

The Food Service Solutions system can also be extended to replace “one-card” programs in use at 45 percent of the nation's universities. Such a fingerprint-based system would operate in much the same way — minus the ID card — for a variety of options including university stores, library use, residence hall access, washer/dryer and even time-and-attendance.

Campbell University

Campbell University implemented a point-of-sale (POS), fingerprint scanning and card reading system. More than 90 percent of the students at Campbell adopted it with no trouble. Only a few have refused and continue to use a mag-stripe card.

The fingerprint identification system has been installed at four outlets on the 100-acre-plus site at Campbell: the Marshbanks Dining Hall, Oasis Deli, a café and a grill.

Food Service Solutions came on site to install the system, which is comprised of its proprietary software to identify users, fingerprint scanners, card readers and POS registers. Each register at Campbell's four food service sites is hooked up over the campus network to one server in Rumbold's office.

“With our system, we have the capabilities to edit, delete, set prices, view reports of specific item sales, track sales by cashier and more,” Rumbold says.

Westminster College

Many colleges outsource their food service operations to companies such as Sodexho Inc., Gaithersburg, Md. Sodexho introduced a fingerprint system from Food Service Solutions to Westminster College more than a year ago, and the college uses it to serve up to 5,000 meals a week at the campus.

“The system only took two days to install and train staff on how to use it,” says Charly Kizzire, IT supervisor of Sodexho Food Services at Westminster.

In the past, if a Westminster student forgot an ID or food card, for example, the cashier would have to look up the ID number. Unfortunately, other students would sometimes hear that number and use it themselves. “We had a few accounts losing money that way, and biometrics has eliminated that problem,” Kizzire says.

Implement wisely

When it comes time to implement a biometrics system, Rumbold's advice is, “Don't do what we did.” Due to time constraints, he was forced to implement the system a few days before the start of the semester without any time to train staff on how to use it. Based on that experience, he advises leaving any installation until the end of the semester.

FOR THE RECORD

About the Companies

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