
Show HN: the app that powers our order fulfillment warehouse - plusbryan
http://plusbryan.com/rocket
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chime
I do this for a client of mine and over the years, have found the following to
be the best solution:

1\. iPod Touch / iPhone with LineaPro Barcode Scanners:
<http://ipclineapro.com/> \- managers with personal iPhones get a new case,
others get iPods.

2\. Enterprise iOS license, annual update of certificates is the only chore.
Otherwise no worries about deployment of code to each device because it's web-
based. All inventory movements, order picks/puts are real-time, wireless.

3\. Basic HTML webview that goes to //intra.net/barcode/scan/[barcode] upon
each scan. The web server handles the rest.

4\. Use HTML5 with type=tel for entering numbers. Use PhoneGap-style JS-to-
ObjC routing for playing alert/warning/success sounds.

5\. QR Codes are slow. LineaPro is instant and has a red-laser.

6\. Print labels on Zebra Z Series: [http://www.zebra.com/us/en/products-
services/printers/printe...](http://www.zebra.com/us/en/products-
services/printers/printer-type/industrial/z-series.html) \- by POSTing an XML
to the printer's IP. Design multiple labels with variable fields and in the
XML include label name, number of identical copies per label, and the data per
label. Prints within 0.5 second.

I think I've deployed 40 of these scanners and 10 printers and they work great
in a very heavy-use environment - think 10000+ scans, 2500+ labels a day. The
app itself is styled with high contrast and readability / error-minimization
in mind instead of gorgeous iOS end-user color scheme. So lots of red and
green backgrounds instead of shades of beige.

If you can keep the user from having to go back to a computer after each task,
it can save a tremendous amount of time and effort. Native iOS apps are great
for AppStore users but in intranet environment, I vastly prefer HTML5 because
not only can I test the app remotely, I can add any feature I want with
minimal effort and show the user anything they need to see - from daily task
list and current order status to inventory by bin location and empty bins.

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jtchang
I've written a fulfillment engine before. It is complicated and generally does
not lend itself to reuse. The reason is because the problem space is usually
very specific. Building a general solution that fits everyone is near
impossible.

That said Amazon actually has a Fulfillment API. The real trick is integrating
your fulfillment into all your other business processes.

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shimon_e
Open source alternative for Android: <https://github.com/Genshin/SpreeAndroid>

~~~
shimon_e
See also the design doc: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K-C33WjH5GooNKW-
GsW7-Ol_...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K-C33WjH5GooNKW-
GsW7-Ol_K4-7PbwVxPk3Vs2MmO0/edit)

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troels
_The user enters how many boxes they want to pack and clicks Print, which
prints a unique QR code inventory control label for each box. The packer
affixes the QR code labels to the packed boxes, places them in the staging
area, and moves onto the next box._

I've built a logistics system, where we did this until I realised that it is
much more convenient to have a roll of pre-printed labels, that are scanned by
the operator and then linked to a record in the application. You don't have to
wait around for the printer to complete, you don't even have to input how many
boxes you want to pack - You just point and scan. It also allows you to have
the labels attached to the boxes in advance (or printed on). You can buy a
roll of pre-printed bar codes for cheap, from print shops etc.

In general, I found that "reversing the order of control" works very well.
Instead of having the system tell the operator what to do (which would be a
natural solution from a software perspective), it's often much more flexible
and efficient to have the operator tell the system what he did and then deal
with that.

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rjempson
Its amazing how much people love their phones. What's the bet the warehouse
employees want to supply their own phone, just so they can touch it all day.

I was involved in a project where we had to build an iOS UI for wholesale
electricity traders, because the traders really wanted to be able to do their
work from their phones. It wasn't driven by a business need, the starting
premise was 'we need to be able to make trades from our phones', and then some
waffle was constructed to justify the project.

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ck2
Is... is your "warehouse" a spare room in your office?

The use of the amazon warehouse image is a funny comparison.

"Fake it 'til you make it" I guess.

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rshlo
That's a great solution and a great starting point for further optimizaion in
the future.

As mentioned here before, I was surprised to see that this is no
shipping/inventory solution for small businesses. I've searched a lot and all
I can find is high end solutions for large enterprises.

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joevandyk
Any advice on software / best practices for improving warehouse packing
efficiency and accuracy? And inventory management?

We've got a warehouse that has hundreds of SKUs and processes tens of
thousands of orders a day, but we're not very good at it yet.

~~~
plusbryan
It sounds like we could learn quite a bit from _you_! The one nice thing about
our boxes is that it effectively limits the number of sku's during the
fulfillment step. Rather than 5 skus per box, we have 1 box SKU. It looks like
you guys fulfill customer orders, which seems like a lot of added complexity.

We haven't had a chance to really ideate around kitting yet, but I've seen how
a couple big 3rd party fulfillment houses do it. My major takeaway was that
you need to slap barcodes on everything.

I'd love to learn more about what you guys do and what some of the challenges
have been. You can reach me at plusbryan at gmail.

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ewang1
hey bryan, did you guys use an existing library for the barcode scanning
functionality or wrote one up from scratch?

~~~
plusbryan
We use zbar, which seems to work well:
<http://zbar.sourceforge.net/iphone/sdkdoc/>

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zaidf
Bryan, the font on your app site seems broken for me on Chrome/Windows 7.
Screenshot: <http://i.imgur.com/jkUkD.png>

~~~
plusbryan
Thanks for the screenshot, we'll check it out.

~~~
tajddin
I can confirm. Win8/x86/Chrome.

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tluong
Bryan, out of curiosity, apart from the IOS app, which web platform has order
fulfillment system been developed on?

