CommissaryPro

The Problem

A catering business was spending far too much time and effort in creating quotes.  Each event had a custom menu and of course the number of people would be different as well.  The owner would plan the menu, then figure out what ingredients he needed and in what quantity.  Then he'd look to see what the pricing would be for each ingredient and figure out based on the cost what the total for the quote should be.  Each detailed quotation would take up to several hours.  Then when it came time to prpare for the menu he would look into inventory and subtract that amount from the total amount of what he needed for each ingredient.

The Solution

We created a program in which all of his recpies were stored in a database along with the amount of each ingredient necessary for a particular yield (servings).  So now he could do a quote literally in real-time.  That is while on the phone he might pick a particular salad, a couple of appitizers, main dish, sides, and deserts and by plugging in the number of people the software would curnch the numbers and give him both a grand total and sub-totals by each dish.  This allowed him to change the menu on the fly in order to modify the total cost to fit within a particular budget.  Of course this meant that the program needed to know costs of ingredients.  And that too was fortuitive because when he got delivery for a supplier the invoice data was entered into the system including of course pricing.  Further because the invoice information was entered into the system the system knew the inventory levels (however inventory levels must be manually adjusted for things like spoilage).  Then when an event was held the system would automatically deduct the ingredents used from inventory.

We also added a feature to view the calecdar of events over the internet cia a standard wb-browswer, as well as on a hand-held device such as a cell phone.