I work at ConocoPhillips and we purchase several items for our refineries. We are currently using SAP for purchasing & tracking equipment. At the present time, when we purchase equipment we manually fill out data sheets and give to the SAP folks in order the get SAP numbers and have them enter the information into SAP.
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My question is: Would it be possible to have the vendor that we purchase the equipment from to place a bar code on the equipment when we place the order? The bar code would have the information associated with it. After we install the equipment we scan the bar code and the information automatically is entered into SAP?
This is very possible and some customers in the Medical industry that we have been involved with use significant serial control and bar code to input transactions into SAP. There is an additional technology layer (Bar code server, scanner, reduced footprint IDOC transactions) you will need to put in to capture the scanned data and transform it using SAP specific IDOCs. Others have used Palm, Pocket PC and Symbol readers to capture this and upload to SAP during synchronization.
This was first published in January 2003