Hi all, my name is Mark. I'm the warehouse manager of Northwest Staging here in Portland, OR. In doing research here on ActiveRain I've found that many of you are using the iMagic Inventory Software (Often bought through www.PropsontheGo.net) for inventory tracking purposes. It seems like the consensus is that it works great for most of you. We've been using this software since early fall of 2007 in conjunction with Microvision's (Flic) wireless bluetooth scanners. For everyone else's sake I'm honestly hoping it's just us, but we've had an amazingly hard time getting this software to work properly for us and was wondering if others have had any issues themselves.
Here are a couple issues we've run into that I'm hoping some users here might be able to help us solve:
- Remembering Settings from previous uses (Column positions, widths, image type *.jpg)
- Sudden slowdowns (iMInventory.exe taking up 99% of our computer resources for no reason) and having to restart the program to get it to function properly again. Which then, as stated above, erases how we had our previous settings
- Thumbnails being the incorrect aspect ratio
- Printing barcodes doesn't give us the option to print the item name along with the code. (If I print off barcodes for 15 items, once they're printed there's no way of knowing which code goes to which item without referring back to the software and checking the number manually)
- Many more issues I won't go into.
All of the issues listed above we've either had to live with or find workarounds for. The barcode problem for instance, we've had to go purchase a separate piece of software from www.WaspBarcode.com just to be able to print barcodes properly. This piece of software integrates well works great with iMagic. Wasp themselves offers an inventory control piece of software that I've tried, used, and overall find is a much better built program than iMagic. Unfortunately it is such overkill for what we need, it is much more expensive, and doesn't allow for item thumbnails. And as most of you stagers can attest, thumbnails are a big part of why iMagic works well.
Networking two computers with iMagic has also been a task we've simply had to work around. I'm not sure how many of you out there are running multiple computers like we are, but for those of you who are have you run into this as well? The iMagic software says it supports networked computers. It does, to an extent. We've found that if both computers are being used at the same time (accessing the database file simultaneously) that computer A doesn't know what computer B is doing and vise versa. Where this becomes an issue is with the Item Numbers and Barcode Numbers. If the last item number that was created is 2345 and both computers A & B are making a new item, both instances of the iMagic program automatically make the item number their working with 2346. So if computer A ends up finishing making their item first, once computer B is finished the program will pop up and tell you that the current item number is already in use because computer A's was finished first. This is the same when it comes to entering barcode numbers (Which as far as I'm aware the computer is unable to do for you and requires a manual entry). We've been forced to call our computer A the "Even" computer and computer B the "Odd" computer. This requires that we take an extra step for each inventory piece we enter. We have to go in and manually change both the Item and Barcode number to the next Even or Odd number (depending on which computer we're using) in order to avoid the computer not being aware of what's going on. I hope all of that made sense as it is a little confusing unless actually performing it.
Technical issues aside I was wondering how most of you go about scanning your inventory into job specific invoices. I have a feeling most of you scan each item you're using for the specific job as it is loaded onto your truck. This is something we could do, though once our staging day is done we would have to backtrack at the end and un-scan all the items we didn't end up using. We've been scanning each item at the jobsite once the stage is complete and then adding the invoice after the fact. We've had varying success with this method due to the limitations of bluetooth technology being a "batch" scanning process meant for instant transmission of data from the scanner to the computer, instead of our "offsite" scanning method. The Flic scanners can store the information internally at the jobsite without issue, it's just the re-synchronization back at the warehouse that has been an issue. I've been researching different types of scanners to better facilitate this method of scanning but am wondering how others go about doing it.
Anyways I'm hoping the other iMagic users out there are not having these same issues as they are quite a pain to deal with. But if any of you are or have, we'd definitely appreciate any feedback you may have as to solving/working around these issues or naming another inventory control system that you find works better.
Thank you in advance for any help/advice you may give,
~Mark / NWStaging
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