Identium Inventory Management

OVERVIEW

The store room inventory lived in an Excel sheet that nobody could use on the floor. This app takes that sheet, converts it into a tag indexed JSON store, and wraps it in an Electron desktop app with seven views: live scan, session history, a searchable inventory table, a row grouped view, tag registration, audit, and reader setup. It talks to fixed Identium network readers through a .NET helper process and accepts handheld HID scanners as plain keyboard input. Everything is editable in place, and the whole inventory or the scan history can be exported to CSV, Excel, or PDF.

THE CHALLENGE

The source of truth was a hand kept Excel sheet, not a database. A blank crate cell meant "same crate as the row above", row headers were sometimes typed as RAW instead of ROW, and a few EPC strings had stray non hex characters, so the converter had to carry state down the sheet and normalise as it went. The real data also has the same EPC printed on more than one crate, so lookup could not assume one tag maps to one box and had to return every grouped match and mark it ambiguous instead of silently picking the first. On top of that the fixed reader is only reachable through a vendor .NET SDK, so the Electron app drives it through a child process over stdio rather than a native module.