What a small Samsung Android Phone can do.

I recently spent a few days on-site doing an ERP implementation of BlueBox for a new customer, and was reminded how powerful a simple Android phone can be in business systematisation.

Our clients run a small sports and schoolwear clothing manufacturing and sales business and required point of sale, inventory, production control and integrated accounts with xero.com.

Easy enough with BlueBox, I had a 3 days scoping session with them, followed by a week of bespoke PHP/MySQL programming, and this last visit was the final implementation of another 3 days. (Side note - it always amazes me how long it takes for 'big ERP systems' to eventually fail in their implementations, while BlueBox quietly achieves what to most in the industry would consider impossible when it comes to speed and success of deployment.)

In this process we identified that bespoke order-taking facilities would be required at the front-desk (ePOS) and have implemented sales order creation facilities within our ePOS to allow sales people to take the order, amongst normal sales items, which then creates the required sales orders in the back-office.

These are then displayed on a dashboard for production control and visibility, and various automated customer communication triggers (SMS/text message and email) are sent at points in the process.

Now to the phone. In order to track and simplify jobs through the production process, we added QR codes to the bottom of each Sales Order, one for 'previous stage' and one for 'next stage'. Stages are mapped to Sales Order categories which essentially become production process maps. Initially I thought we'd need small tablets to scan the barcodes/QR codes at each stage, but, strangely, we found that tablets (no names mentioned because it seems to apply across the board) have notoriously poor cameras, which do not seem to offer the ability to macro-focus on barcodes. Who came to the rescue? A dirt-cheap Samsung Galaxy Ace (old model!) for under £80 with a 5MP camera scanned the QR codes from stage to stage perfectly.

So our final implementation used web-served QR codes on each sales order, delivered by Qrickit.com, and these were scanned into the Samsung Galaxy Ace using the Barcode Scanner App by Zxing Team, which neatly bounces each scan onto our BlueBox cloud based system to a bespoke script that moves the sales order forwards or backwards in the production process.

So quick. So affordable. So powerful. And... so easy!