TechArchive

Original article date: May 1999

A couple of issues ago I talked about streamlining the purchasing process by creating “plug and play suppliers”. I received some correspondence from readers pointing out that every day, goods-in departments and accounts departments key in large amounts of data (eg delivery note numbers, order numbers, invoice numbers) when these could be barcoded. Plenty of streamlining opportunity there too, and a lot less radical.

Then this week I read the startling statistic that with manual data entry, one in two hundred characters are mistyped but with barcodes it’s more like one in two hundred thousand misreads. Wow. One in two hundred? No wonder we sometimes get delivered the wrong thing by our suppliers!

But barcoding is all pretty serious investment isn’t it? Er… no.

If you go to www.hallogram.com/barcodes/bcfonts/ you’ll see that it’s possible to obtain and use (royalty-free) a Truetype font for barcodes. So your Windows based program which generates printed documents could be generating barcodes too! (Obviously you need to figure out what text string to print, but worst case you buy in a Visual Basic add on). When it comes to displaying the barcode, it will be just a few characters in a particular font – no different from printing a phone number in Times font!

Even better, if you go to www.hpcpos.com/p-320.html you’ll see a barcode scanner that connects via the keyboard socket. So barcodes which you scan in will arrive at the computer as bursts of text (with optional ‘enter’ character) just as if you have typed them. No need for your keyboard operators to have new software, they just have a plug-in typing aid in addition to their keyboard.

And these are just the very first products I grabbed off the web in a five minute search. There will be better, cheaper, more local products (try the keyboard specialists like Cherry Electrical), but you can see what I’m getting at. It’s all out there! There’s no excuse.

Moving on, a continual discussion point at the moment is whether or not the Microsoft stranglehold will be broken by Linux. Linux is a free, robust and generally likeable operating system that more and more people are saying presents a viable alternative. You can now buy new PCs with a choice of Linux or Windoze installed. Some big corporations (I heard IBM!) have moved over to it. I’ve considered it myself. How many times each day does some unexplainable Windoze bug lose me five minutes or more? How much redress have I got? None.

Because it came with the PC, my Windoze is an OEM version. Which means that in return for being allowed to bundle it at less than shrinkwrapped price, the PC maker agrees to support it. So if you call Microsoft and say “Oi!” they say “not our problem”. Of course, you can always give them your credit card number, then they’ll speak to you. But if you have a serious problem which does seem to relate to a bug in the OS, your PC reseller (whoever they are) will not be able to fix it. Suffice it to say, if I could go to a more stable OS with a happy-to-help community of software authors tomorrow, I would. But I can’t, because of all the PC programs I use.

Now, there will be folk out there saying “the equivalent of Office for Linux is fine and it’s cheap/free” or “Office itself will be on Linux soon”. But our CAD system? Well, there are loads of them about for Linux, many of which have come from the Unix environment where they used to live on workstations. They port to Linux better than they port to NT. But what about the MRP system? The accounts system? If you were starting from scratch, would you start in Linux? Maybe. But would you switch your company over now ?

May 1999