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In today’s video and blog, I’m just gonna go over the basics on how to set up and implement a barcode system in your warehouse in your supply chain logistics warehouse or freezer unit kind of freezer environment warehouse. I get this question a lot. We go to a lot of pre-sales meetings, inventory management meetings for small businesses, and small warehouses that are getting set up.

This video and blog make you easier with this whole pandemic because our team has been doing a lot of remote work when possible and only on-site work when need be. For example; outages down it are, etc so today we’re gonna go over how to set up a barcode system or implement a barcode scanning system or wireless system in your warehouse.

The first thing you gonna need is, there are three pieces of information that you need or three key ingredients.

One is your WMS or your warehouse management system or they also call it an application server or a supply chain server. Most people call it a database server or warehouse management system. The acronym is WMS for a warehouse management system.

The second thing your gonna need is the hardware. The main part is your Wireless scan guns and also the software that fits on top of this because your barcode scanner is just pictured it as a dumb scanner. It’s a computer but depends what you put on it will work with your WMS or your warehouse management server. Typically the WMS software provider will provide you a software client that goes on to your gun.

This gun (Image shows below) is gonna connect wirelessly over your network into this wireless access point. We have many of these and like I mentioned in some of our other videos for a warehouse that is getting started up. We sell refurbished ones and we can do a low-cost setup for your warehouse for probably about half the cost of a new one. It’s been very popular because a lot of people have temporary warehouses or they only have like a short term lease like a year and that’s all they need it for just to scan products. 

We have a bunch of more cost affordable access points that you can get from us. If you wanna get more advanced and technical there’s another piece of software that goes into on top of here which manages your sessions. When you start doing barcode scanning sometimes you lose information because of the wireless disconnect.

Now there’s a thick client that can sit on top of this which manages a session meaning if this unit ever goes off a network or if it loses his battery or for some reason, there’s a glitch in the network as soon as you put the battery back on or turn it on. It will remember that session and it’ll bring that user back to where he or she was in the picking management system. Just so you don’t lose all the information that you were picking because when you lose all that information then your database and your numbers and the pricing might get out of black and we’ve seen a lot of complaints about that.

Well, the session got lost and now we have to recount it. We have to adjust it to the main database. That’s a really important part and that is called a thin server or thick client-server. The popular one is Avante or wave link of stay link. We prefer to stay link just because of the best cost, best support and we’ve been using it for a number of years and we transitioned over from another vendor over to stay link and all of our customers have been happy.

The third part I want to go over is the access point. This is an access point (image shows below) a wireless access point. I also have another wireless access point. Pretty much the same thing. It’s actually like your wireless access point at home. But it’s industrial-grade and it provides a lot more coverage for your scanners and it also has options where it could provide less frequency so you get less drops and we always recommend to have a professional wireless site survey with the proper tools that we have. Just so you know that what you’re going to implement is going to be adopted properly because too few or too many of these. It can cause a lot of headaches. A lot of our customers, what they like to do is well they have problems in this area. They’ll put one of these but what that does, is it creates a lot of co-channel interference which causes a lot more headaches.

There’s a lot of knowledge to go into when setting this up and then that connects into one of these blue wires which are an internet cable so, you’re gonna need a cabling company to install this and we can handle that for years.  So, we take care of the full warehouse management systems setup. The only part that we don’t touch a lot is the WMS software because a lot of our customers have specific software when they deal with but since we work with the majority of them it’s very easiest to upload the configuration in there because we’ve dealt with. So many software vendors you know we’re from like Manhattan.

How To Implement a Barcode System in Warehouse. Give us a call for a free consultation and estimate on how to properly configure, design, and support a barcode system in your warehouse. We are located just outside of Toronto in Markham Canada.