No integration, no certified handhelds, no conversation with your WMS vendor. If your team reaches the system on Android, it takes a scan.
Warehouse management systems and scanning hardware are usually sold together, and that bundling is where the cost sits. Adding scanning to an existing WMS tends to mean a list of approved devices, a quote, and a vendor engagement before anyone has scanned a single carton.
The keyboard route avoids the whole conversation. However your team reaches the WMS on an Android device — a web front end in the browser, a vendor app, a terminal emulator onto a green-screen session — the fields in it accept typed characters. The keyboard supplies them, and the WMS sees ordinary input.
That makes it genuinely useful for the situations a hardware project cannot serve: proving a process before committing budget, covering a seasonal peak, equipping a second site, or getting agency staff productive on their own phones on day one.
Install Barcode & QR Scanner Keyboard from Google Play, enable it in Android’s keyboard settings and set it as the active input method.
A browser-based front end, the vendor’s Android app, or a terminal emulator session. Tap the field you need to fill.
Point the camera at the carton, the location label or the pallet. The value is typed into the field and the WMS validates it as usual.
An Enter suffix after each scan submits the field or moves to the next one, which is what turns picking and putaway into a rhythm instead of a sequence of taps.
Code 128 and GS1-128 on shipping labels, ITF on outer cases, Code 39 on older location labels, QR and Data Matrix on newer ones. The codes a warehouse actually prints are covered.
Formats, prefixes, suffixes and scanning behaviour can be set centrally and locked through MDM managed configuration or the cloud dashboard, so every handset on the floor behaves identically.
If your team reaches the WMS through a terminal emulator on Android, the emulator takes keyboard input like anything else — so even a decades-old system can be scanned into.
Every scan is kept with its format and timestamp and exports as CSV, which is useful when you need to reconcile what was scanned on the floor against what the system recorded.
Where your team reaches the WMS on Android, yes. The keyboard decodes the barcode and types the value into the field, so the WMS receives it as ordinary input. For continuous high-volume scanning in a cold store or similar, purpose-built hardware still has real advantages — but for pilots, peaks, second sites and smaller teams a phone does the same job.
No. Nothing is installed in or connected to the WMS. The value arrives as keyboard input, so there is no API work, no vendor involvement and no change to the system.
If your team reaches it through a terminal emulator on Android, yes. The emulator accepts typed characters like any other app, so the age of the underlying system does not matter.
Yes. The formats, prefixes, suffixes and scanning behaviour can be set and locked centrally through MDM managed configuration — Intune or another EMM supporting Android managed configurations — or through the cloud dashboard for fleets without MDM.
All the ones a warehouse normally prints: Code 128 and GS1-128, ITF, Code 39, Code 93, EAN and UPC, QR Code, Data Matrix, PDF417 and Aztec.
If your team reaches SAP through a Fiori app or a web front end on Android, the keyboard types scanned values into those fields like any other input.
Read itYour WMS, your internal tool, a Google Form, a ticketing system. If it has a text field in a browser, it takes a scan.
Read itFree on Google Play. No hardware to buy, and nothing to connect to whatever you are scanning into.