MISA: AN OPEN SOURCE MOBILE INVENTORY SYSTEM FOR ANDROID

Abstract

MISA is an open source mobile inventory software for Android devices which is a continuation of the thesis of the researcher. The said thesis was entitled: “Design and Implementation of an Open Source Android Mobile Barcode Inventory Software for the University of the Philippines Diliman School of Economics Library”. The thesis aimed to produce a software which would be able to ease the process of inventory taking in the University of the Philippines – School of Economics Library (UPSE Library). The software was designed closely with the librarians and staff of the UPSE Library in accordance with the User Centered Systems Design (UCSD) framework conceptualized by Gulliksen et al. (2003). The researcher utilized The Rapid Application Development (RAD) approach as discussed by Kendall and Kendall (2011) as the development methodology of the software. For the frontend, the researcher used the Mobile Angular UI framework by Casimirri (2014) due to its user-friendly nature and responsive design. Existing barcodes in the materials were scanned using the ZXing Barcode Scanner mobile app by Owen (2014) to collect inventory data. To determine the operational benefits of implementing the software over the previously manual method, the researcher, with assistance of the librarians and the staff, conducted Time and Motion Study as discussed by Freivalds and Niebel in Niebel's methods, standards, and work design 12th edition (2009). After deliberating the results of the Time and Motion Study, it was determined that the software was able to improve inventory taking productivity by 54.1 percent.