The Best Way to Develop an Inventory Scanner App

Buying an inventory scanner app off-the-shelf is notoriously expensive. Fortunately, this type of app can be custom-built for a fraction of the cost to meet the specific needs of your warehouse team. Building a Progressive Web App (PWA) using Oracle Visual Builder Studio is the fastest and least costly way to get what you need from an inventory scanner system. Let’s look at how it works.

Progressive Web Apps Are the Solution for Inventory Scanners

• PWAs are full-featured web applications with the look and feel of native apps. They dynamically adjust to a wide variety of end-user devices for an optimized experience that looks, feels, and functions like a native app. (Compare PWAs vs. native apps here).

• They can be installed on mobile devices or scanners with different operating systems and have access to all hardware features. They can also run just as easily on a desktop or laptop if needed. 

• The “build once, deploy anywhere” capability of a PWA means companies don’t have to replace their current scanning hardware or devices to get an upgraded solution that works.

Learn More about the Benefits of PWAs for Mobile Devices and Scanners Here.

Using Oracle Visual Builder Studio Makes Building a Barcode Scanner App Easy

Visual Builder Studio from Oracle is a development platform and toolset that provides a wide range of pre-packaged options for building scanner apps. The robust library includes many features that offer the flexibility to create a user-friendly front end to automate data entry, even on scanners with a small screen area.

Continuous integration and delivery/deployment are key benefits of using Visual Builder Studio for design and development. It’s also well-supported as part of the Oracle family of products, so your apps keep working year after year with the latest security updates and enhancements.

As an added benefit, scanner apps designed using Visual Builder Studio can be built to continue to work when the device is offline. Once a connection is reestablished, they push pending data back to the main server. 

What Makes Scanner App Development Flexible Using Visual Builder Studio to Create PWAs?

Unlike monolithic scanner software solutions, building inventory scanner apps as PWAs is a modular process. Each main function acts as its own “mini-app.” Obviously, these mini-apps can be housed under a single interface that makes it easy to find all the functions in one place. Or, they can be independent apps. As an example of a modular suite of scanning apps, inventory transfer, label printing, and sales order entry could each be their own app within the scanner software. 

Because of the modularity of app development, companies can prioritize which functions to build first. This means they can typically roll out their first custom app in just a few weeks and keep adding functions seamlessly over time with additional app features. This “deploy as you go” approach is another thing that makes PWAs a popular option for affordable inventory scanning apps.

Read about how scalability & compatibility make a difference in warehouse inventory operations.

What’s the Build vs. Buy Tradeoff for an Inventory Scanner App?

With traditional mobile apps, there are often LOTS of options to choose from, making the build vs. buy debate complicated. With a barcode scanner app for inventory, the choices are much more limited. Unfortunately, the options for off-the-shelf scanner software are usually very expensive, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. They come with a lengthy deployment roadmap, and there are usually company-specific requirements they can’t meet, even with extensive customization efforts. 

A custom-built inventory scanner app is actually much less expensive. Using Visual Builder Studio to create a set of progressive web apps that can be deployed on scanning devices is possible at a fraction of the cost, and takes much less time. 

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