School Lunch Orders

With Health & Safety issues meaning that pupils bringing packed lunches to school had to have them stored, where appropriate, in a chilled environment, this school decided that all packed lunches would be provided from a 3rd party supplier on a daily basis.

The overall requirements for this system were to:

  1. Collect the orders from pupils/parents
  2. Create orders on suppliers
  3. Create lunch bag labels
  4. Follow up payments.

To implement all these requirements we built the system using Visual Basic with an Access database behind the user interface (although any database could have been used, e.g. Paradox, dBase etc.).

  1. The preferred method for placing orders was via the internet, as in this way it was possible for payment to be collected through WorldPay. But of course not all parents were able, or even wanted, to place orders in this way, so a method was also required to handle telephone orders to the catering office. To handle the first method a web site was created allowing the user to select what items were required for any particular day, with the facility to order one single day, to a whole week or a whole term (or pretty much anything in between). Once the order was complete, it would be paid for by credit or debit card using WorldPay.
    Once the order was completed, the details were sent by email to the catering office, where they were routed to a special folder in Outlook and then imported automatically into the system.
    There was also a similar system in the office where parents could telephone in their order and follow up with a cheque payment.
    The database behind the web site containing the food options was maintained from the desktop system run in the catering office.
  2. The data held in the system was then used to generate orders which were either printed and faxed or emailed to the suppliers the day before they were required.
  3. Also, at the end of the day a printout of all the data for each pupil was created and printed onto standard mailing labels showing details of the Pupil Name, Form/Class and the items which had been ordered. These labels were then placed onto lunch bags and the bags filled from the delivered items from the suppliers.
  4. Whilst Internet orders were paid for using Credit/Debit cards (i.e. instant payment), telephone orders were usually paid for by cheque, so a system was included for reporting unpaid orders, and for recording payments as they were received.

The whole system was run from the one desktop application, from maintenance of the products available, through the provisioning process to the reporting and payment system.