When it comes to product development, our customers steer the way.
Earlier this year, we made a great new development to our WAERlinx WMS product. A new customer, HSNF, whose staff come from all over the world and for whom English is not their first language, wanted to replicate a feature on their existing packing screen, on the handheld devices used by picking staff, whereby items are listed not in words but in pictures.
Our development team loves this kind of challenge – it’s what keeps WAERlinx a step ahead of the competition. So they set to, with the toughest challenge making sure that the code was light-weight enough to ensure that the image would upload and display quickly enough on a handheld device.
So how did they go about it?
Initially, they investigated methods for displaying asynchronous images in a web page. They then looked at several techniques and weighed up their differences before deciding on the best one to use for WAERlinx. The code was then incorporated into the WAERlinx framework to display the images on any given page, including in tables, which has now become an integrated feature in the sandbox version of the software.
For HSNF, all warehouse staff, English-speaking and not, can now pick and pack more accurately and can associate an image to any page where an item’s SKU is displayed.
And if the customer introduces a new product, they can simply and quickly upload a new image or fetch one from a third party source such as a URL.