[geeks] Warehouse Handhelds

[Gaz God]

I was involved in develop a system which used symbol hand-held scanners to
do similar to what you are talking about. When the scanners were dropped in
their cradle the files were uploaded to a pc running dos and a TCP stack
which had a batch file cycling round which then ftp'd the file to the
server. Then we had a cycling job which loaded the transactions in the files
to the ERP database, I modified the EDI routines in MFG/Pro to do this part
which is where all the work was done.

This was 10 years ago and I found out recently its still running exactly as
it was set up, despite been a cludge solution that was supposed to be
replaced as soon as we had time!!

This was all done around barcodes, but without them you have an uphill
battle i think.

Gaz

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 05:57:22PM +0000, Mark Benson wrote:
>
>
>> We have a small stores and need stock control. We need to be able to
>> check in and out stock and also stocktake the stores without being
>> tethered to a PC. We have no bar codes, and implementing that would be
>> impractical at this stage (our suppliers don't even use them).
>>
>> I was looking at toughened handhelds running WinCE. I don't like having
>> a WLAN in the building for security reasons so I'd like some way of
>> logging transactions on the handheld then dumping that top a PC via the
>> cradle.
>>
>> Buying a solution in is beyond our means, so our usual policy applies.
>> Buy the hardware and write the software. Problem is I've never developed
>> proper software, let alone for WinCE...
>>
>> Any alternative (apart from paper)?