Turbocharge your processes with Quickbase barcode scanning
Turbocharge your processes with Quickbase barcode scanning
Does your company care about tracking their ‘stuff’? Specifically, their physical assets, such as parts, product inventory, or computer workstations for employees? They should! These assets are often expensive and represent an investment your business has made. It’s critical to keep good track of these items so your business can best use them to grow and thrive. Since the Universal Product Code (UPC) was initially introduced in grocery stores in 1974, companies across most industries have been leveraging barcodes to help their assets – is it your turn?
Barcoding systems are effective because they reduce the human error common to any hand-keyed system. Tagging items with barcodes and then utilizing barcode scanning simplifies many processes that involve capturing data. The simplicity and accuracy of scanning barcodes allows more information to be captured and processed in less time. It also speeds up common tasks like inventory management. The Quickbase mobile app, now featuring barcode scanning, assists users in unlocking the ease and convenience of barcode scanning systems.
Barcoding challenges businesses face
While all businesses have some processes that could be improved with barcode scanning, not every business has had the resources or technical skill to implement barcode scanning systems – until now! The Quickbase Mobile app with barcode scanning reduces the barrier to entry for businesses looking to implement barcode scanning systems.
Other businesses have extensive experience with barcode scanning and already have vast databases with barcode information. However, like many homegrown solutions, these barcode databases were purpose-built to address specific processes. As new use cases arise for a business, Quickbase can act as the customization layer, pulling in specific information from homegrown solutions and allowing users to scan barcodes to leverage the existing data for a new purpose.
Introducing barcode scanning for the Quickbase mobile app
Every application that is built on Quickbase is instantly ready to be used through our native mobile app (available for iOS and Android), without any special mobile development. Now your users can scan barcodes with their phones or tablets, without you as the app builder needing to change anything about your apps. Now you can support barcode scanning without the need to hire a professional developer to extend your Quickbase app and without needing to buy dedicated hand-held barcode scanners.
How barcode scanning can help you
With the addition of barcode scanning to the Quickbase mobile app, you have a whole world of new opportunities to improve your business’s processes. Here are some scenarios to start thinking about:
- Closed-loop inventory systems: Keep track of parts, suppliers, tools, and materials you stock, purchase, or consume. Knowing what you have on hand and where to find it prevents costly disruptions, saves money in purchasing, and increases sales revenue. For example, a manufacturing company could track purchase orders, suppliers, and delivery dates of items being received and shipped. This gives them a complete understanding of their processes so they can work on process optimization.
- Asset tracking for fixed assets: Track capital equipment such as office furniture, computers, machines, buildings, telephone poles, etc. Attaching a barcode label to each of these allows a company to account for what it owns, conduct physical inventories, know when to perform preventative maintenance, look up the history of these items, and collect further data. For example, workers in the field could leverage barcode scanning to double check that they are about to perform maintenance on the correct item. A telephone pole looks a lot like other telephone poles unless you have a barcode verifying its identification. Affixing barcodes to items in the field makes the process of identification easier and faster for the field worker. This also improves the accuracy of the data field workers collect.
- Asset tracking for circulating assets: Circulating assets include equipment, tools, files, and other valuable inventory that changes hands within an organization. Tracking who has custody of each asset can maximize efficiency and reduce the chance of losing equipment. For example, tool cribs on manufacturing floors allow employees to check out specific tools needed for specialized work. Applying barcodes not only to each tool, but also to the employee’s badges and work orders allows the company to make sure each tool is returned promptly. You can do this by capturing which item is being checked out (using the tool barcode), by whom (using the employee barcode) and for what purpose (using the work order barcode).
Some technical detail about how it works
Scanning a barcode with the Quickbase mobile app is as easy as tapping anywhere you could enter text, tapping the barcode icon above your phone’s keyboard, and taking a picture of your barcode.
This can be used throughout the Quickbase mobile experience:
The Quickbase mobile app supports many common barcode formats, including UPC and QR codes. For a complete list, please see our help topic on mobile barcode scanning.
Once you’ve tried barcode scanning, please let us know what you think by entering your feedback in this Quickbase app.
Further reading
