Abstract
In this work, a development of stock counting system using PDA is presented. The design and development issues are studied for the case of a superstore in Thailand. The stock counting is a tedious work in a department store. Employees need to physically walk down the shelves and count the amount of items each day. The amount of items is compared to the amount in the system to check for the loss of items every day. For a large-size department store, many employees need to spend lots of time to perform the tasks. Introducing the use of PDA together with the barcodes of the products will help automate the process, save time, and reduce the errors for checking the stock counts. In this paper, the design of system presents in the aspect of 1) the PDA software client and server sides 2) wireless access point installation costs and plans. After the development, the system is employed. Its efficiency is compared to the manual counting and the user satisfactory is evaluated.
TopBackground
In (Physical Inventory Guidelines, 2007), the process of conducting annual physical inventories is described. There are three major steps which include planning for a physical inventory, conducting the physical count, and reconciling the physical inventory.
The planning phase is to prepare the conduction. Several steps are involved that are to plan the staff, schedule, related parties, prepare storage area, team development, prepare the guidelines. In the conduction, the control of inventory tags or count sheets is required. Each item should be counted twice. In the last step, reconciliation means finding the difference of the physical count and the balance in the database. The correction and adjustment are made in this step. Also, the quantity on hand and the quantity used or sold during the year are compared by the simple equation.
Quantity used of the current year = Physical count previous year + Purchases during the current year – Physical count of the current year) .
Key Terms in this Chapter
Difference Report: The report that shows the difference between the actual count and the count values from the inventory database which implies the loss of the products.
Repeater: It is a device that receives a signal and retransmit it at a higher power or amplitude.
Fixture: It is a special number uniquely used to reference for inventory items.
Cycle Inventory Counting: It is a process of counting inventory on a regular basis such as yearly, monthly etc.
Physical Inventory: It is the process of performing physical counting of items in the inventory.
Count Sheet: It is the formed paper used in keeping tracking of inventory items. In the sheet, it has the fields of item descriptions, item quantities, prices, etc.
Signal Strength: It is the magnitude of the signal measured from a reference point such as from a wireless access point.