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Small businesses often struggle to get their orders on point. Sometimes they buy too little and sometimes they buy too much. In both cases there are costs attached with having a wrong purchasing strategy. We have created an analytical tool that will help you calculate your orders in a more accurate way. Tell us how many guests you are expecting and how much product you have on hand and we will suggest you how you need to order.
I have personally experienced this since I am currently owner of three restaurant businesses. They all have a management team and a kitchen head and constantly they get the ordering incorrectly. This only affects businesses and clients in general. This is why I thought this could be a good idea.
- We make a series of calculations taking into consideration different parameters. We check the selling history of a restaurant business to identify the % share for every dish you are selling. We also anayze how much quantity of each product you add to every recipe. With that, we just add how many guests you are expecting to visit your business in a period of time and how much you have in your stock and Voilá! You will receive and automated calculation which suggests how much you should order.
- As a user I want to easily understand the information of what the page can do.
- As a user I want to easily find an efficient path to test the tool.
- As a user I want to see how this could be useful for my business.
- As a user I want to find the page very easy for my team to use.
- As the organisation we want to tell how useful this tool can be for small and medium businesses
- As the organisation we want to be reliable and offer real solutions to real management problems.
- This page introduces you to the purchase order tool and explains you the concept. It also asks you to login and to run a demo to understand better how the page works.
- This page was built in a very straight forward way. When the page loads, a chef pops up to give you more information about how the Purchase Helper works. The idea is to fill up the information fields required, which is what I considered are the essential elements required to run calculations. A start and end dates are set to measure the amount of days you are placing an order for. Afterwards, a projection of clients in this period of time visiting your business is required. Then there is a Created By field and we pass to the On Hand table. Here the user will fill up how much of each product they have got on their stock. With the projection of guests and the on hand details, we can run the functions placed in the back with the "Calculate Order" button. This will call all the arithmetic operators placed in different functions in the JavaScript files.
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This page will throw the information of fields filled up in the calculation page and place them automatically. The table below will show the results of the arithmetic operations generated as a consequence of filling up the information on the calculation page. The table contains a lot of detailed information which are needed to be able to get the total amoount results. The tool will always need certain constant values in order to function. I declared these values in objects in order to execute the operations. This would be adapted to the information of different restaurant businesses. Below the table, the user will find two buttons. One the offers to create a new order and the second button offers to submit the order. By clicking this button an order will be generated and sent for approval (this feature is not working at the moment. It only takes you to another page for demo).
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For better design and user experience I have created a scroll bar to see the order results on mobile devices.
- All input fields require input from the user in order to continue. For the calculations form, validations where added with Javascript. Styling is very basic so there is some margin of improvement here.
- This page shows a confirmation message that your order has been approved and that an email has been sent to the manager in charge of approving the order. It also generates an order number when the page loads. In the future the orders generated will have a proper numeric system in order to be able to keep track.
- The only common feature to all pages is the footer which contains a Copyright messsage.
- Add more navigation items to the nav bar
- A FAQ page.
- An educational video on how the calculations are ran.
- An option to load measurements in kilos aside from the punds option.
- The possibility to have users filling up their own information to run the system independently.
- The total amount should not return with a negative value so this is something I would like to adjust with conditions.
- I have some unfixed bugs from the validation input fields. The *Requried field message is only showing in the last element when the rest of fields remain empty.
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For this project I considered the need to make the tool very efficient. Often I find pages very difficult to navigate and to get to the point of the product that is being offered. I was constantly running the operations on the chrome developer tools to see if the functions where connected properly. Since I wanted the results of the calculations to appear in a different page, I struggled a lot with finding the correct function to pass the values from one html and js files to another. I spent several days figuring this out until I found a solution in StackOverflow. I also had to change the position of some of the columns in order to improve the user experience. This also meant I had to change the Id's of many elements.
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In order to add the correct responsiveness I added media queries for three different sizes.
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My goal is to make a more efficient document. I targetted the elements mainly by their Id's since I felt I could identify them better but I expect I can adjust the functions with for loops.
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Testing was performed with the following devices/browsers:
- MacBook Air computer: 1280 x 800
- Google Chrome
- Firefox
- Microsoft Edge
- Kindle Fire HDX: 800 x 1200
- iPad Air: 1536 x 2048 display
- iOS Safari
- iPhone 11 x pro: 414 x 896 display
- iOS Safari
- MacBook Air computer: 1280 x 800
I also tested the site with the Chrome and Firefox developer tools to simulate the display on other devices and test the responsiveness of the site.
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HTML
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No errors returned when passing through the official W3C Validator.
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Index.html
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Calculations.html
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Order.html
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Approval.html
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CSS
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No errors returned when passing through the official Jigsaw Validator.
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Css Style
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JavaScript
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No errors returned when passing through the official JSHint Validator.
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Calculate.js
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Order.js
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Approval.js
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I have used the developer tools lighthouse option to create reports to measure different indicators for both mobile and desktop.
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For both reports, the accessibility score was of 100 on the login and approval pages but of 85 when testing in the pages with tables. I followed the recommendations suggested and added aria-label attributes to inputs so the accessibility scored high.
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The site was deployed to GitHub pages. the steps to deploy are as follows:
- In the GitHub repository, navigate to the settings tab
- Under the GitHub Pages from the source section drop-down menu, select the master branch
- Once the master branch has been selected, the page will be automatically refreshed with a detailed ribbon display to indicate the successful deployment.
The live link can be found here -- https://danpr1984.github.io/Analytical-Purchase.Order/
- The page was conceptualized and structured by myself. As a restaurant owner and manager I am always trying to seek for opportunities to improve. I thought of this idea and wonder if it could be of any use for real operations.
- The text was entirily written by myself and the logic of operations where written by myself.
- I found a lot of suppor from the Code Institute Slack community as well as from https://stackoverflow.com/ and https://www.w3schools.com/.
- The note book used as a logo was imported from Microsoft Word public images library
- The chef that walks you through the page and explains you what to do is from: https://clubpenguin.fandom.com/wiki/Swedish_Chef
- The font used for the header comes from: https://fonts.google.com/