SKU Thingy

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SKU Thingy is a Palm OS application I wrote while mired in the despair of "recovery" and "audits" at Office Depot. For those fortunate enough to avoid these events, they involve going through each item with a scan gun, recording any items that have the wrong number of tickets, that have incorrect prices, or that don't say "As Advertised" when they were in the ad. We then get to enter them into the singularly worst-coded application in the Windows pantheon.

Most employees tend to write errant SKUs on a piece of paper with many columns, and those of us fortunate enough to own PDAs typically follow a similar approach. My system involved using 1 line/SKU in the Memo Pad, using a simple code. For example, this is how I would mark that we need 1 bin label and 3 take-a-tickets for the "Cheap Leather Chair":

442441 1b 3t

There are a few problems with this approach:

• Personally, as I write faster, my handwriting gets messier. On paper, this can mean errors, and many people handwriting SKUs end up with 1 or 2 random labels at the end. With Graffiti, this means backspacing and trying again.
• It's easy to get lost in a large list, especially as you have to go back and forth between list and screen. Paper makes this slightly less of a problem, as you can mark your place, but this means yet another step, and IMHO a handwritten list tends to look more crowded and confusing anyway.
• Due to the way StoreFront works, you have to go through the list numerous times, once for each type of signage required. See above problem.

SKU Thingy offers the following features:

• A specialized entry form for each item, offering a numeric keypad with audio feedback and distinct fields for each type of signage.
• When you are finished with your audit, select the type of signage to print, and the SKU Thingy loops through each SKU, displaying the SKU and the quantity in a large font.
• Since StoreFront doesn't tell you how many pages of stock you need, the SKU Thingy does it for you.
• If you'd ever like to compile some statistics on which items have tickets frequently taken, etc, you can generate a report which ends up in the Memo Pad.

Not yet implemented:

• Backup and restore.

I would say with some confidence that I've cut my workload when doing an audit to 1/10 of what it was previously. Of course, this just gives me more time to walk in circles. Maybe one day we'll get some customers.

I wrote the SKU Thingy in Scheme, using Fred Bayer's excellent LispMe system. The forms and other UI elements were generated using the evaluation version of RsrcEdit, developed by IndiVideo and acquired by Quartus.

Follow these steps to install the SKU Thingy:

1. You will first need LispMe installed on your PDA.
2. Download SKU_Thingy-0.9.zip and install the files "SKU Thingy.pdb" and "SKU Thingy Rs.pdb".
3. Launch LispMe from the Applications screen and select the "Icon" checkbox for "SKU Thingy". Tap the name "SKU Thingy" and select "Switch". You should see the message "Welcome to LispMe".
4. Go back to the Applications screen, and you should now have a "SKU Thingy" icon which you can launch.

Note: Don't hit that "Break" button when reading the list back, unless you want to end up in the development environment.

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