Re: BPCS Barcode -- BPCS-L

You might check the archives on this.

There have been past discussions here of the relative merits of multiple competing solutions from many different brand names bar code solutions for BPCS environment..

1. SSA does have native support for Bar Coding, in which some people opinion is that what is native to BPCS cannot hold a candle to "professional" bar coding software. Further, as new versions of BPCS come out, that "support" is dropped in favor of a different approach, which can complicate your conversion process. Thus it is critical for you to state what version of BPCS you are at, and what the prospects are for your company to switch to other versions, before anyone can advise you on what data collection you should or should not be using that comes with BPCS.

2, There are an infinity of "professional" bar coding software packages out there, but most of them do not talk with BPCS ... there are however, a fair number of 3rd party packages that do various kinds of bar coding and do work well with BPCS. But they offer different collections of services, so it becomes important for you to state what you want the bar coding for, so that people will not be advising you on packages that do not support what you need the bar coding for.

Perhaps it would be helpful to ask people what THEY use bar coding for, then you can correlate that with what you think your company needs it for. For example, we use bar coding outside of BPCS to label packages where some customers want the items, that we ship them, to have those cartons labeled with bar code system that is consistent with how they track their material. There are many times I have wished that we had it to help with physical inventory, and streamline data transcription.

Will you be needing "advanced" bar coding such as RFID, or the kind that has been around for decades, such as radio frequency devices on fork lift trucks that can talk to the AS/400? There's a special kind of bar code that can go on envelopes to postal service that get you lowered postage rates. For a printer to be able to generate the actual bar code in volume, such as on your standard paperwork, that costs more than a printer that not need that capability.

There's shop floor reporting ... thousands of inventory transactions, labor transactions, other transactions ... which can be streamlined via bar codes on the paperwork from BPCS, and on the containers of inventory. There's gadget can be interfaced to dumb terminals and PCs so that you get document, bar code identifies what item it is, customer order, lots of stuff to screen, then human being keys in variable data ... the sequence of data entry and the process involved may need revamping.

Some of these solutions insist that the same people who do the factory work, also use the scanners for what time they start / end what work ... some factories have a double standard with respect to hiring and pay scales, such that there are minimum wage people not expected to interface with the computer system.

There's communications with customers and vendors ... thousands of documents, whose processing can be streamlined with bar codes on the documents, and scanner that says what each document is for, and where its data goes into what BPCS files. :

has anyone using barcode on BPCS ? is there on BPCS Barcode functionality
or Barcode create outside the BPCS ( BPCS just receive the code like item
master etc ) ?

Thanks

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