Barcode Scanning

What Are The Benefits Of Using Barcodes In Your Warehouse?

So, what are the benefits of using barcode scanning? The 2 main benefits of a business using

scanning with a stock control process is accurate and speed.

Barcode Scanning For Your Warehouse

Track thousands of unique parts with confidence and accuracy, across multiple warehouses with ease.

Incorporating barcoding technology in your warehouse can help speed up day to day processes and increase accuracy.

Do you run a warehouse that stores thousands of unique items? Are you continually receiving and shipping new items? If so, you understand how difficult proper inventory tracking can be. With a powerful barcoding solution, you can easily control and track all your items and approach 100% accuracy in your inventory tracking.

Fishbowl’s wireless barcoding technology can save you time and money by increasing employee productivity, reducing excess inventory, and freeing up capital. Whether you have one warehouse or one hundred, the ability to easily and conveniently scan inventory will help your business. You can even print your own barcodes and custom label all your items, Fishbowl can produce these labels for you!

With the simple scan of a barcode and the press of a button, you can easily move inventory from one location to another. Fishbowl also allows you to quickly update the condition and other attributes of your inventory items. This gives you the ability to manage your entire inventory in real time. Fishbowl’s barcoding solution, Fishbowl GO, integrates with the Fishbowl Warehouse and Fishbowl Manufacturing software. The best user experience is achieved using a handheld Android scanning unit, and for part time use Fishbowl GO can be used on an IOS or Android Smartphone.

With a fully functioning barcoding scanning system, you will have complete wireless access to your inventory management.

Accelerate Your Warehouse With Fishbowl GO

Fishbowl GO will accelerate your warehouse management processes, and enable you to:

• Cycle counts for stocktake
• Pick stock
• Pack orders
• Ship consignments
• Receive goods in on Purchase orders or Transfer orders
• Move inventory around your warehouse
• Add Inventory
• Scrap
• Look up Parts
• Work Order processing
• Create new Sales Orders on the go
• Delivery – On screen Proof of Delivery signature capture

How Does Barcode Scanning Save Your Business Money?

More often than not, one of the most labour intensive day-to-day processes in a stock-based business is the human resources required to: print off Picking Slips, Pick stock off the shelf to a shipping area, Pack and dispatch the stock and then, once that’s complete, enter all those transactions into an accounting system for invoicing.

Using a process of scanning products, as you pick them off the shelf ensures that the action is recorded immediately in the inventory software while having the added benefit of ensuring the correct stock is picked for the order, removing the need to record the fulfilled order for invoicing.

Elite warehousing software like Fishbowl Inventory also offers more advanced pick logic such as routing to ensure picks are produced and passed to the warehouse team with the most efficient Pick route for the products, allowing you to pick multiple orders at once by
consolidating picks for multiple Sales Orders into a single, efficient Pick Process. The second most time-consuming process for a warehousing business, and often the most hated, is manual stocktakes.

Although completely necessary to ensure the business stock levels are accurate, manual stocktakes can take multiple days and require multiple staff. During stocktake, a commonm issue is the dispatching of customer orders and the receiving of new stock during this time of manual stock count. Fishbowl Go alleviates these issues with the use of barcode scanners and an instant cycle counting method.

The stocktaking process becomes even more efficient with the use of barcode scanning if
the business has the requirement to track additional data on their products such as batch
number, expiry dates or serial numbers.

What Are Barcodes And How Do They Work?

Barcodes are a surprisingly simple concept. A barcode is nothing more than a machine readable representation of a piece of data. To make the barcode machine readable, barcodes are often displayed as a pattern of vertical lines (1D barcode) or sometimes as a pattern within a square shape known as a QR Code (2D barcode).

When a person scans a barcode with correctly programmed barcode scanning hardware, the device will transform that pattern into the data it represents. For example, the 1D Barcode above is a representation of the number below it. When a scanner scans the barcode, it will convert that scan into the number or characters it represents. For the scanner to work correctly, the correct symbology needs to be activated on the scanner hardware. This can usually be done by a programming sheet that comes with the barcode scanner (for simple scanners) or via a program installed on the device for mobile device scanners.

With modern smartphones, software apps are now available which utilises a camera on the phone to use optical character recognition (OCR) technology to identify the barcode within the camera image and convert it to the data it represents.

How To Use Barcode Scanning For Stock Control

The power of barcode scanning is achieved by combining the action of scanning a barcode on a scanner with software such as an Inventory Management system like Fishbowl Inventory to perform an action in that software such as receive a stock item into a warehouse, or picking a stock item off the shelf for a customer’s order.

Using a scanner with stock control software like Fishbowl can do much more than simple product recognition. Scanners can be used to pass other bits of data to the software such as Shelf Location, a Batch Number or Serial Number, or a transaction such as a Sales Order/Pick Ticket, or in a Manufacturing environment perhaps a Work Order.

In the example above on the left, this is a simple single piece of data such as the product number that is stored, however the example above on the right has two pieces of data included in the one barcode. These pieces are separated by the identifier shown in the brackets. This way a single scan of a barcode can import multiple pieces of data at the same
time!

Where Would You Use Barcodes In Your Business?

SOFTWARE

The business requires a stock management system in place such as Fishbowl Inventory, to handle the stock and order data.

LABELS

All relevant assets need to have the appropriate barcodes applied to them such as shelf locations and products. If not already done, does the business need to print its own barcode labels for certain products, and if so, these should be attached to the products upon receiving into the warehouse or onto a bin location.

HARDWARE

Has the appropriate hardware been decided on and is it connected to WiFi or a mobile network?

TRAINING

Speak to people that have experience with the best practices of using scanning technology in a warehouse environment. Businesses such as Fishbowl Inventory have Client Success Consultants that visit every client onsite to roll out tailored solutions. By being onsite with you, in your business, a process and a workflow can be designed and tested and your warehouse team can be trained to ensure the desired outcomes of using scanning within the business are met.

What Software Do You Need?

True mobile barcode scanning in your warehouse requires software for this purpose. It is not as simple as putting barcodes on your items and scanning them, you need software to do something with that scanned label. You could carry around a laptop with a USB scanner, but come on it’s not the 90’s, scan on the go with a hand held scanner and a full mobile app for ultimate efficiency.

Software such as Fishbowl Go is designed with mobile barcode scanning as its main focus. Fishbowl Go connects in real time with your Fishbowl server so that data transfer is immediate. As soon as stock is picked this data is updated for the rest of your team to see. When choosing the right software for your business, ask if there is a full mobile scanning app that is native, 3rd party integrations for scanning can be a nightmare so keep it in house.