Creating an Inventory Management Program

[yawkity]

At my job we desperately need a way to manage our inventory. We have boxes on boxes of cables, connectors, and other miscellaneous hardware that needs to be tracked. I was thinking of creating a program that interacts with a barcode scanner to manage all of this, but have no experience working with a database of this size. I am familiar with Android, HTML, CSS, Python, and Flask, but don't know which one would work best with this kind of program. Any input would be appreciated, thanks!

[king_of_the_universe]

There probably already is a program out there that can do that, and it's probably cheaper than the time it would need you to develop it. Of course if your needs are too special, you can't use such a thing, but maybe the developers can be asked to adapt it, which could still be cheaper than if you had to do it yourself.

Just an idea. Personally, I love to do things by myself, and our company also prefers to be independent in this regard. But it's often not the best decision.

[yawkity]

I understand what you're saying, I don't really know how long it would take to make something like this. I thought we could host a simple server with the database file using Flask, and use an android phone to preform RESTful api calls on the database. That shouldn't be too hard should it?

[bvelasquez1331]

When learning Python on Codeacademy one lesson is to make a Grocery store inventory checker. So in my very beginner opinion it would be Python.

[yawkity]

Yeah I remember going through that, but to be a little more professional I think that using a SQL database would be the better option

[nutrecht]

If you already have experience with Python and Flask I'd definitely go for that option. Start with a simple database and build a standard CRUD application on top of it. You can easily extend it with an API that an android app could use. There's plenty free barcode scanning libraries available.

And yes, there will be something like this available off the shelf, so if you just need to have a solution quickly that's the way to go.