At 4:14 PM in the sterile basement of a regional distribution center, the fluorescent tubes hummed with a low, vibrating frequency. A single plastic card sat on the laminate table. It was a standard credential with a glossy finish and a silent chip buried in the white core.

Beside it, a half-eaten apple sat as a reminder of a diet that had started precisely fourteen minutes earlier. I looked at the card, then at the apple, and felt the familiar pang of a system trying to shed its unnecessary weight.

On its reverse side, beneath the magnetic stripe and the legal disclaimer, lived a thin barcode. It was a Code 128 format, crisp and black. It occupied a specific territory of real estate that had been carved out seven years ago during a frantic system migration.

At that time, the barcode was a temporary bridge. The new RFID readers were delayed, and the security team needed a fallback to ensure employees could still clock into the warehouse. The barcode was the insurance policy. It was the “just in case” that everyone agreed would be removed once the proximity chips were fully operational.

The proximity chips have been operational since the second Tuesday of November, 2017.

Yet, the barcode remains. It is printed on every new batch of cards. It is factored into the artwork proofs. It is a line item in the digital database. In a recent audit, the operations team realized that not a single scanner in the entire facility was capable of reading that specific symbology anymore. The hardware had been upgraded, but the image on the card had been fossilized.

The High Cost of Uselessness

This is the birth of the permanent second workflow. It is a phenomenon where a provisional solution hardens into an organizational dependency, not because it is useful, but because the cost of verifying its uselessness is perceived as too high.

In any large-scale identification program, there is a tendency to preserve requirements rather than revisit them. We treat our credential designs like sacred texts, fearing that if we remove a single element, the entire architecture of our security might crumble in a way we cannot predict.

This statistic is a quiet indictment of how we manage our physical assets. We carry around the weight of past anxieties. We pay for the ink and the processing time to include features that serve no purpose other than to satisfy a requirement that has lost its owner.

When the original project manager left the company in 2019, the “reason” for the barcode left with them. Now, the current team assumes the barcode is vital for the IT department. The IT department assumes it is a requirement for the payroll team. The payroll team has never even looked at the back of the card.

He was right. When we look at the cards produced by a manufacturer like

WXR,

we see the culmination of a thousand small decisions. These cards are sophisticated tools, capable of housing LF, HF, or UHF chips. They can be made of wood, metal, or recycled plastic. But the most sophisticated chip in the world cannot overcome the drag of a redundant workflow.

A company might specify a MIFARE DESFire 4K chip for its high-security encryption. They might choose a sleek metal finish to reflect a premium brand identity. But if they are still printing a 1D barcode on the back “just in case” the 13.56MHz frequency fails, they are maintaining two parallel universes.

The danger of the backup workflow is that it eventually becomes the primary source of truth for someone, somewhere. Perhaps a small satellite office couldn’t afford the new RFID readers. Instead of requesting a budget increase, they found a dusty handheld scanner in a closet.

They saw the barcode on the cards and realized they could use it to track tool rentals. Suddenly, a “temporary” feature on the card becomes the backbone of a sub-department’s entire inventory system.

The Frankenstein Credential

When the main office finally decides to remove the barcode to save on printing costs or to make room for a larger logo, the satellite office screams. To fix the “problem,” the organization would have to buy the satellite office new RFID hardware, train the staff, and migrate their database. It is cheaper, in the short term, to just keep printing the barcode.

This is how we end up with “Frankenstein” credentials. They are cards that have a chip for the front door, a magnetic stripe for the cafeteria, a barcode for the tool crib, and a printed photo for the human guards. Each of these technologies represents a different era of the company’s history. Each requires a different maintenance contract. Each adds a layer of complexity to the procurement process.

When you work with a versatile supplier like WXR, the temptation is to include everything. Since they can provide the chip, the material, and the custom printing in a single coordinated order, why not add the magnetic stripe? Why not include the barcode? It feels like getting “more” for your money. But in the world of operations, “more” is often just another word for “friction.”

The friction is not just in the cost of the ink. It is in the mental load. It is in the ambiguity of a replacement card order. If a card fails, which part failed? Was it the chip? Was it the stripe? If the employee can’t get into the building, they might try to swipe the stripe or scan the barcode at a reader that isn’t configured for them.

This creates “phantom” error logs in the security system. It wastes the time of the guards who have to investigate why a “valid” card was rejected.

My stomach growled. The diet was proving difficult, mostly because I was thinking about the efficiency of a single, perfect meal versus the cluttered snacking of my usual routine. Workflows are the same. We snack on redundant features. We add a little bit of data here and a little bit of printing there, thinking it doesn’t cost much. But the cumulative effect is a bloated system that is slow to change and difficult to secure.

The Executioner’s Charter

To break the cycle of the permanent second workflow, an organization must assign an “expiration date” to every requirement. If a barcode is added as a backup, the project charter should state exactly when that backup will be decommissioned. It should name a person responsible for pulling the plug.

Without a designated “executioner” for redundant features, the features will live forever. They will outlast the employees who requested them. They will outlast the machines that read them.

We must become comfortable with the “silent door.” We must trust our primary systems enough to let the backups die. If the RFID system is robust, the barcode is not an insurance policy; it is a distraction. It is a sign that we do not fully believe in our own modernization.

When a buyer approaches a manufacturer to identify an unknown chip in an old card-a service that helps bridge the gap between old and new-they are standing at a crossroads. They can choose to replicate the past, ghosts and all, or they can choose to prune the workflow. They can look at the sample and say, “We need this chip, but we are leaving the barcode in the grave where it belongs.”

The card on the table mocked me. It was so thin, yet it carried the weight of seven years of indecision. I picked up the apple and took a bite. It was crisp. It was simple. It was exactly what was needed, and nothing more.

I realized then that the most powerful thing you can do for an identification program is not to add a new feature, but to have the courage to remove an old one.

The permanent second workflow only exists as long as we are too tired to have the conversation about why it started. We keep the barcode because we don’t want to explain to the satellite office why their dusty scanner is obsolete. We keep the barcode because we are afraid of the three minutes of downtime that might occur if the chip fails.

But those three minutes are a small price to pay for a system that is clean, understood, and owned by the people who use it.

The next time you look at your company ID, don’t look at the photo. Look at the back. Look for the lines and the codes that no one uses. They are the scars of old fears. They are the evidence of a workflow that is lying to you, telling you that it is necessary, when in reality, it is just waiting for someone to be brave enough to hit the delete key.

Optimization is not just about making things faster. It is about making things lighter. It is about realizing that the “just in case” of yesterday is the “too much” of today. João would agree, even if he were as hungry as I am. We don’t need a backup for everything. Sometimes, we just need to make sure the front door works, and then throw away the key to the basement.