User guide

10
Barcodes Best Practice
In InventoryControl, when you are asked for a number to identify sites,
customers, items, locations etc., we s uggest you always use a short sequential
set of numbers or numbers and characters. Put the full text description of the site
or location in the description field, not the number field. These numbers can then
be printed as a barcode and used to scan locations into mobile devices. We
suggest you estimate the largest number of sites or locations you will have and
pick a range of numbers that are reserved for each. For instance, if you have up
to 60 sites, you should reserve 100 to 199 for your sites. Each new site you enter
will get a number from this range. If you want to more closely tie the number to
the site, add a one or two letter designation to the end of the site number.
For example, use 100US to designate the m ain US warehouse and 101UK for
the warehouse in the United Kingdom. If you expect to have a few hundred
suppliers, reserve 1000 to 2000 for suppliers. Manufacturers can have 500 to
599. Items should start at 20000. This range reservation serves two purposes.
First it allows those who know the ranges to easily distinguish a designation for
the warehouse from the designation for an item if all they see is a barcode on a
paper or a box.
In this example, when a stray box is presented to the warehouse manager and
he sees barcodes with 101US C050100
he
knows this box was stocked in the US warehouse on row C shelf 05 bin 01.00.
Theboxmayalsohaveabarcodewith20104whichheknowsistheitem
number and can be used to put the item back into Inventory. Without these
barcodes, the box might have to be opened to identify the item and then
someone would have to track where i t came from and where to put it away.
Second, reserving a range of numbers makes the process of deciding what
number to use for new designations much easier. If you add a manufacturer and
you already used 512 the next is 513.
Another thing to consider when creating your numeric representation for
locations and items is that some devices only support a reduced set of
characters. Some mobile devices, such as the WDT2200, do not have a
keyboard that can support lower case letters or the whole range of special
characters. With these devices, if your item number is 10000(1) you will not be
able to type the item number or scan in the number from a bar code because the
parentheses character is not supported. All our internal barcode labels use Code
Figure 6 Figure 7