Spot check of casks/kegs by scanning them on the mobile app - show info, allow taking notes, ullaging, returning, etc

Edit by Breww team:
This thread has changed its purpose somewhat (and the title has been updated to match). This feature request is now to allow scanning any tracked container on the Breww mobile app and:

  • Seeing what is in it
  • Seeing where it is
  • Allow entering notes
  • Allow ullaging
  • Allow returning from the customer to the brewery
  • Log as cleaned

The original first post was:

Hi, would it be possible expand the ‘container’ tab on mobile to have a bar code scan check which then jumps to mark as damaged label if it fails (or struggles).

We currently rack using a handheld scanner which seems to have a higher success rate than the phones we use for deliveries meaning some labels that could do with being replaced are slipping through the net at the racking side.

3 Likes

Thanks for the suggestion, Omar. I can see why this would be useful, but I’m not sure it will be possible to implement, to be honest. Barcode detection and reading is really complex, so in our mobile apps, we get the built-in services available to us from Google (on Android) and Apple (on iOS) to handle this for us.

We essentially stream to their barcode detention services a live feed from your device’s camera and hope they come back and let us know that a barcode was found (this all happens locally on your device). We expect to get back a message from them saying, “Hey, we found a barcode of F01”, at which point we process “F01”. Other than a simple timer like “no barcode detected for 20 seconds”, we don’t have any way of knowing things like “there’s probably a barcode here, but I can’t read it”. And even if we could, there could be many reasons why it might struggle to read it that might not be the barcode’s fault (e.g. camera out of focus, a finger over part of the lens, etc).

I like the suggestion, but I’m just not sure it would be possible.

If you’re not using our “Advanced 2D” barcode format, I’d certainly suggest gradually migrating to this as this format is far better as coping with damage as all the data is encoded into the barcode multiple times allowing for parts of the barcode to be lost and all the data to still be available.

Hi Luke, understood. In that case, having the ability to scan a keg and go straight to the container information screen would be really helpful. It would be good to be able to look up a keg by scanning it, great for spot checking kegs and if it didn’t scan in easily it would highlight a label issue.

As requested originally, placing a separate option on the container tab on mobile would sit perfectly.

It would improve the efficiency of the ullage or return process at the brewery as scanning to the container info screen would remove the possibility of user error when manually typing the barcode in.

We have a few hundred kegs on the old barcode which are being updating to the newer style as we speak, we’ve seen a big improvement on scanning where the qr code style are used.

Cheers,

Thanks Omar, this sounds like a great idea. I’ve renamed the thread here which I hope you’d agree describes this suggestion well and will hopefully help it pick up more votes.

If anyone else would like to see this, please give this a vote :+1:

That’s great to hear :ok_hand:

A post was split to a new topic: When trying to rack into a filled keg, show in the error message what it is filled with & when from

Being able to scan a keg for a spot check would be super helpful for us. It’s something that we’re used to with our old keg tracking software KegShoe. :+1:

1 Like

ok so the subject was just to lure you in, but while you’re here, please spare a bit of time to imagine what this might look like.

Sometimes, post racking, the brewery have produced 150 kegs but there are only 149 in breww for us to transfer to warehouse. YES, we know this SHOULDN’T happen and hopefully in the future it will become rarer as an occurrence… but… what if we could…

SCAN a permanent label, and we would know …
what type of container it is
what the permanent label id is
where that container is theoretically located
what is currently IN that container - batch, beer, bbe etc

And THEN… not do anything with that information other than view it… so for instance, if we were looking for 1 keg that was not racked correctly, we’d be able to easily locate it rather than having to try to rack all the kegs again until we hit one that is not racked.

The second reason this is a good idea is that recently, 2 kegs out of a batch of 150 kegs were racked from the wrong BBT… while we rescanned and tried to rack the 2 missing containers, they all obviously reported as “full” suggesting we were missing something… if we could have just found out what they were FULL WITH… then we’d have saved a lot of lot of pain.

please can we has this functionality?

  • the prize would be knowledge, and we’d all be winners

thank you

Jason

3 Likes

Thanks for the great suggestion, Jason… and the title did lure me in for sure!

Fortunately, we already have a request that closely matches your request (and has a number of votes), so I’ve merged yours with this one.

If anyone else would find this useful, please give this thread a vote :+1: