SAP Barcoding for Parts Warehouse

A customer with a parts warehouse wanted to integrate barcode scanners into their SAP workflow in order to increase the accuracy of collected data, improve the efficiency of collecting the data, and update SAP in a much timelier manner than their previous manual processes. They have an internally managed on-premise SAP S/4HANA system, with both onsite and remote corporate IT support.

The customer selected to use Honeywell CT60 handheld scanners.

This ruggedized device with a smart phone form factor supports 1-D and 2-D laser barcode scanning, and a 4.7-inch high-resolution (1280×720) display running the Android mobile operating system. It comes with a 4040mAh rechargeable Li-ion battery.

Honeywell carries a number of other models in the CT product line and so customers should review the Honeywell CT product line for the best available options for their particular circumstances.

We initially delivered the NLINK ADC to SAP Solution with just four SAP Inventory Management transactions from our out-of-the-box baseline library of SAP barcoding transactions:

• MB1A-261 (MIGO) Goods Issue to Production Order
• MB1B-311 (MIGO) Transfer Posting SLoc to SLoc
• MMBE Stock Overview
• MI04/MI05 Physical Inventory Count/Change Count

Early in the project we discovered that the customer needed the Goods Issue to Production Order to post with respect to the Production Order’s underlying Reservation. We have both options in our pre-built baseline library of SAP barcode transactions so we switched out that transaction. They also requested Goods Issue Reversal (MB1A-262), again with respect to Reservation. We expanded the scope of the original project and built that SAP barcoding screen for them based on the already approved Goods Issue screen.

During the project it became apparent that the way the customer actually used their SAP system would require a few changes to all the delivered SAP barcoding screens. For example, they do not use the SAP Warehouse Management module, but do use the Storage Bin field at the Storage Location level on the Material Master. Consequently, we quickly added that field to all the barcode screens to support their unique process.

In some cases, we customized the screens further, using the presence or absence of a value in a particular field to change the flow of the transaction or the presentation of information to the user. For example, in the SAP Stock Overview screen, they wanted to see zero stock levels if the Storage Bin field had a value, but not if it was empty. Overall, however, the out-of-the box, pre-built SAP barcoding baseline screens worked well for this customer.

Our customer found the delivered SAP barcode screens much simpler and easier to use than the default SAP screens. Consequently, they also use them on their desktop computers since they run on any compatible HTML-5 browser. With this additional real-estate available on a desktop monitor, they asked for some more changes to the SAP Stock Overview screen, so they could paste in a list of Material Numbers from another application and see all the results in one list. Clearly, this would be impossible to do on a SAP handheld scanner with limited screen size but worked perfectly on the desktop.

We also added a quick and easy way to change the color scheme. Our customers frequently prefer to set up a separate SAP test environment, and a common request was an easy way to know which environment their SAP barcoding users were connecting to. Changing the color scheme makes it very easy to visually identify the environment that your SAP barcode users are interacting with which, among other things, ensures no inadvertent barcoding posts to the production SAP system during testing.

After using the delivered SAP barcoding screens for a while, the customer had some really great ideas for a truly customized version of their Goods Issue screen. You can read about the results of this project in these blog posts: here and here.