- Several people scanning at once, all onto the same list
- Reads both label formats that coexist in the ERP
- Anything unrecognised is still saved, and flagged for review
- The full content of every scan is always kept
- If the wifi drops nothing is lost: it sends itself when it comes back
- One spreadsheet at the end, filtered and corrected
The problem
Stock counts were done on paper and written up afterwards. With several people counting different racks, merging the lists at the end of the day was a job in itself, and transcription errors surfaced once nobody could remember which shelf each number had come from.
What was built
Each person opens it on their own computer, types their name and the location they are about to count, and from then on they just scan. There is nothing to click: a short green beep if the code is recognised, a double beep and amber if it looks odd — and it is saved anyway, flagged for review.
Below, everything counted in that location is visible, theirs and their colleagues’, with the name of whoever counted it. If two people are on the same rack, they see the same thing.
The detail that makes it usable
After each scan the quantity box opens with the cursor already inside it, because most items are a single unit and that way nothing has to be touched. The problem is that the scanner then fires into a text field. The application tells the scanner apart from a person by typing speed, so scanning can carry on without leaving the box.
The label-reading rules live in a single file, in two constants. When the format changes, that is the only place to touch.
What is never lost
The full content of every scan is stored exactly as the scanner read it, in its own column. Any manual correction can be compared against the original, and a line flagged for review is fixed by typing the right code over it: the application re-reads it with the same rules as always.
Measurable results: awaiting the client’s authorisation to publish them.