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Is it possible to integrate OpenVPMS with OpenbravoPOS to enable barcode scanners etc?

Submitted by Guest on Tue, 09/03/2010 - 21:40
in

Hello,
Our practice has been searching for a retail point-of-sale solution for managing stock. We would like to be able to scan the barcodes of products for entering them onto our system and also print labels with the barcode and price on them.

After some searching we installed Openbravopos: (http://www.openbravo.com/product/pos/). It has worked very well.

OpenVPMS would be a very attractive program for our practice if it could integrate with or emulate the functionality of openbravo. Is this integration possible or are there any plans to enable openVPMS to scan barcodes and print barcode labels?

Thanks and keep up the good work.

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Is it possible to integrate

Submitted by tony on Wed, 10/03/2010 - 09:57.

Hi,

Thanks for your post.

The openbravo pos system looks very interesting.  Good to see another open source java project doing so well.

There have been some limited discussions on POS integration into OpenVPMS.  This was specifically targeted at integrating with EFTPOS terminals which I think is a very worthwhile project and would streamline front desk processing of payments and subsequent till reconciliation issues.

Here is a link to the discussion:  http://www.openvpms.org/forum/till-issues

Currently OpenVPMS does allow you to use a scanner to search for and select products.  We do this by providing an area in the product information where you can enter "identities" which are essentially alternative identifiers for the product.  We do also have a area for supplier specific barcodes (some suppliers generate their own barcodes if the product doesn't have one and actually sometimes when it does).   At this point these are not used during product searches but I think this would be a worthwhile and relatively easy to implement new feature.

Printing bar code labels would also be possible using a report.  OpenVPMS uses jasperreports like OpenBrava so generating a report that queries products and their identities and generates barcode labels would be very straight forward and would not require any  development work apart from designing the label templates. 

Of course the other alternative is integrate the two applications.  I note that the OpenBravoPos and ERP systems synchronise product data etc using the pentaho PDI opensource ETL project.  We actually use this same project for doing data migrations into OpenVPMs and have written a plugin transform step to simplify the process.  There would be a lot to analyse before we could say it is possible but this may be worthwhile for someone to investigate.

I think my preference would be to build some additional POS features directly into OpenVPMS. Specifically POS terminal integration, better barcode support (as mentioned above) and potentially a new touch screen compatible interface to speed OTC and other similiar transactions.  I think there would be a lot of support in the OpenVPMS community for these enhancements.

Of course if you are happy with OpenBrava POS we would be very happy to provide you with the necessary information to facilitate integration. 

Cheers

Tony

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