Automating Production Reporting
Across Two Software Platforms
for Seattle’s Iconic Box Lunch and Catering Provider Gourmondo
Maybe it’s the baguettes.
They’ve been delivered fresh each morning from Le Panier bakery in Pike Place Market for the last 20 years.
Then again, it could be the brownies. They’re made by Jen Clancy, who runs a local wholesale bakery.
Or maybe it’s dressings and marinades, made in-house every day.
Whatever it is, Gourmondo has concocted food
magic as it’s grown from a modest start into a
premier regional food service provider – offering
fresh, locally sourced catering services and
box lunches to food-savvy Seattleites.
Their problem wasn’t success.
The problem was seeing it.
Consolidating production reports from two software systems
The rapidly growing company was using two separate software systems – Monkey Media for online box lunch sales and Caterease for the catering side of the business.
In order to deliver a consolidated set of production reports to the 100 or so members of the kitchen staff, Gourmondo had created a patchwork of Excel sheets and exported data files that was taking upwards of five hours a day to generate.
Consolidating with spreadsheets would never scale, it was putting a brake on growth.
Consolidating the data to speed reporting and reduce errors.
Enter Rivet Hammer.
When we first met with Gourmondo to review their report-generation system, we were blown away by the ingenuity it required to manage a very manual Excel process.
We also quickly saw that we had an opportunity to make a big difference for the business.
Here’s what we did.
First, we built a software solution that connected Monkey Media’s API and Caterease’s local SQL data feed to automatically gather all of the company’s data into an intuitive production-reporting dashboard.
Gourmondo’s orders can now be consolidated in up to thirteen intuitive production reports, and four labels that can be printed on demand.
Next, we built a batch reporting system to allow for rapid report generation at critical times during the day. Gourmondo staff can now generate an entire set of reports with a single click.
Finally, we created a new user interface. The new UI lets users manage accounts and track report history. Both standard users and admins can be assigned with unique rights for each account type. And every account is password protected with a unique User ID.
The history page shows the time and date of all reports and labels generated so that staff avoids duplication of effort and can run new reports if additional orders have been added.
New reports in minutes
Now the reports that used to take all evening to generate can be created in minutes.
Gourmondo generates Excel reports and PDFs on-demand, saving the company hours of frustration, improving production accuracy, and allowing the kitchen crew to get home in time to pick their kids up from school.
Which is one delicious ROI.
Tech specs
Here are the technologies we used to create Gourmondo's reporting solution.
Front end user interface
- HTML5
- CSS3
- JavaScript
- VueJS 2
- Laravel Blade
Back end database, logic and queries
- Laravel (PHP framework)
- Monkey, Caterease ODBC connection
- MongoDB (Database)
Server configuration
- CentOS
- PHP
- MongoDB