Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Oracle warehouse management and barcode scanners

I just received a box from one of our partners containing a Symbol barcode scanner. We have had a meeting with this partner to discuss the usability of handheld scanners in combination with Oracle E-business suite and even do we where convinced that this should work out of the box we still wanted to test this before we should consult our customers to purchase a curtain brand of scanner.

As a Oracle Applications service provider we also do have to consult our customers on what they should have as workstations and other hardware on site and not only focus on the server part in our datacenter.

In short I received a new Symbol scanner and a Zebra label printer to test on Oracle. Today, on day one, I have decided to start testing the barcode scanner. To my surprise this was much easier than I expected. The barcode scanner is, when scanning a barcode, taking the role of your keyboard. Nothing fancy about this, it simply puts the numbers and characters into the location where your cursor is at this moment. This might come not as a surprise to people who have worked and developed with a barcode scanner but if you are new to this it is quite cool to find out.

Also the setup of the entire scanner is quite straight forward, plugin your USB cable into a workstation, synchronize the scanner with the docking station by scanning the barcode on the docking station and you are in business. That is all there is to.

When starting my research I was planning on writing a deep technical blogpost on how you can enable barcode scanning with Oracle, the “problem” is that I can not write such an blogpost as there is nothing deep technical about.

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