I am new to the no code community as of a few weeks ago. I have been reading and joining a lot of communities to learn more. It started out as a personal interest, but now I have an issue at work that I believe no code would be a perfect solution for and a great way for me to get started - I am just not sure on how difficult this will be to build for a first time project and which no code tools would be best (I am thinking bubble).
Basically what I would like to build is a tool that allows us to scan barcodes for our inventory so the order pickers can match the items and quantities needed to the sales orders to prevent mis-ships and short ships. We currently use Unleashed Inventory Software (https://www.unleashedsoftware.com/) to manage our inventory.
What I would like to do is use the Unleashed API to pull the data from our sales orders into this tool I will build. The tool will have to have the ability to add our product info into it (a database of all our barcodes and the associated product and quantity that barcode represents) as well as the ability to scan the barcode of each product and run it against the Sales Order. Once the quantity scanned and the product numbers match and all the items have been picked and scanned for the Sales Order in question, the system will trigger some sort of confirmation (like printing the packing slip or something along those lines).
Can someone with more experience in the No Code space shed some light on how easy/difficult this may be as well as the best way to go about this? If it’s possible, I can likely get some resources to spend money to hire some help and get it done as well.
It is certainly doable, but it will require some hours of hard work or financial investment to pull together. I would say you could get the data in and a core system working in a few days, it will be all the little things and ideas that you and your colleagues have along the way that will take the time.
One thing that stands out is the equipment requirements are obviously outside the scope of bubble. The only part that would concern me is that an on premise database would be more suitable for this sort of application, but this can be mitigated as long as the risks are identified.
Thanks for the reply! When you say the “equipment requirements are obviously outside the scope of bubble” are you referring to the scanner? We have a generic scanner that works with just about any program - is there a way to build this sort of integration in bubble that will allow it to recognize and input the data from the scanner?
In terms of risks, are you referring to that fact that our order information would have to funnel through bubble?
Yes I was just really stating the obvious that you may need to spend some time getting the hardware right. A USB scanner to ASCII to a text field in browser would be simple, but going up to custom hard coded stand alone wireless scanners will take time to integrate. I’m not sure what kind of operation you are running, and how many scanners you want etc.
On my second point, This relies on decent networking infrastructure, and everything being, ‘in the cloud’. That might be fine for some business, but not fine for others.
It’s nothing too complicated. Would only need one scanner for now. Basically what I would like to do is optimize and track our order picking to eliminate mis-ships and short ships like I mentioned. How I envision doing this is having a program that pulls the order data, optimizes it to tell you what to pick, and then allows you to scan until complete.
For example, if we have “Product X” that is stored in different sizes as follows:
Case quantity: 100 units
Each case is made up of four separate “sleeves” of 25 single units
Case quantity will have a separate barcode that the system will recognize as 100 units of Product X. Sleeve quantity will have its own barcode that is recognized at 25 units. And single units have their own barcode.
If we get an order for 252 units of Product X, I would like the program to be able to pull this from our order software and spit out the optimal picking instruction:
2 cases of Product X
2 sleeves of Product X
2 single units of Product X
The order picker can then pick each of these and scan them. Once everything is picked and confirmed, there is some sort of confirmation such as printing of a packing slip that allows the order picker to move on to the next order.
Everything we use is cloud based so there should be no issues there.
Sounds very straightforward and super easy to make some quick progress to determine if this will be the best method for your idea. Barcode scanners are fun to work with - I’ve been building a POS system from scratch and have been using Code 39 barcodes with a linear scanner. Barcode scanners just take a code and appear as a keyboard typing the number very quickly to the computer so that won’t be an issue to get it working with Bubble inputs. Sounds like you’ve outlined your idea pretty well - what’s holding you back from going for it and building out your idea?
Yeah I would get cracking with it, sounds like you know enough to get it off the ground.
make some thing that is simple, but works and show it to your colleagues, people are usually pretty amazed at what you have done so it will help to get them on board early on, far better than saying, ‘I need 25k to pay someone to build this app.’
You can always get some advice on here and if you get stuck.
I’ve just started digging into the different no code options out there and wanted to do some more research to try to determine which platform had the capability to do something like this and might be best to try first. Just wanted some opinions from people who have used bubble or other no code apps as I haven’t used any yet so I am not 100% sure what it entails. Now that I know its possible, definitely going to give it a shot
