Business Problem

Mobile laser scanning applications for Microsoft Dynamics Ax 2009 are complicated, over-engineered, and down right ugly.  Many applications exist and are very configurable but provide a very poor user experience which in turn slows down the end user and makes the data gathering more error prone.

Solution

After evaluating several tools to provide Cycle Count, Purchase Order Receiving, Inventory Transfers, and Miscellaneous Receiving we decided it would be best to take a 37signals approach to Get Real with our application.  We provided our warehouse team a set of tools that allowed them to accomplish their job in a simple and user friendly manner.  In addition, we minimized our cost per mobile barcode scanner.  By using a $200 iTouch as the brains and a $499 Linea Laser Barcode cradle we dropped our $3,000 mobile scanning hardware to $699.

The user interface is built using Novell’s MonoTouch and is written in C#.  The XCode tools were also used for some screen layout.  No Objective-C was used on this project.  The iTouch applications make WCF calls to interact with Dynamics Ax 2009.  The WCF Services are written in C# 4.0 and employ the .NET Business Connector to interact with the ERP system’s data.  An Ax project that uses X++, Forms, Classes, and Schema Additions is used to provide a succinct API to the WCF Services.

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