webamboos

MissCake is a small Romanian bakery shop that offers high-quality services, and has one of the most appreciated cakes and sweets at the events happening in town. Working in the food industry is a challenge by default as the business owner has to often face short deadlines and perishable ingredients. 

While having this in mind, planning becomes a primordial step ahead of anything else. MissCake’s owners prepare rigorously, each day what they need to deliver and they take into consideration all the orders that entered during the week. Besides the ongoing daily activity, a typical bakery business needs a higher number of employees, vacation days for them to rest, a thorough planning, and more.

THE CHALLENGE 

Resources planning and prioritization are the two elements that can shake the core of a bakery business, and we faced the need to scale the existing solutions for better efficiency. As a first step, we had to build a template that would contain all the bakery’s products and the phases that each product needs to go through in its standardized process.

In a second phase, we had to develop an algorithm that would generate the planning and product prioritization for the upcoming three months, by taking into consideration the following factors:

• The manufacturing phases needed by each cake & their priority

• Delivery and perishability date

• Vacation days and working hours for each employee

• The total number of employees and their data

• Total number of products leaving the bakery

ALWAYS PUT YOURSELF IN CUSTOMER'S SHOES

Understanding the real needs and problems of Miss Cake, we started with discovery sessions through online meetings, and then we continued with product demonstrations, as soon as technological advancements were made. 

This process had a tremendous impact on the custom development of the software because we manage to collect direct feedback from their customers. This is how we managed to be sure the product development is going in the right direction and ensure a thorough process automation. 

SOMETIMES CAKE LAYERS AND FLEXIBLE ALGORITHMS ARE FEW STEPS AWAY

If you take a look at cakes and technological systems, you’ll be amazed by how similar they are because at the end of the day they both work with layers. In the algorithm that we worked on we had to define how a simple order would split then in the type of cakes and days required phases for production, and finally get a person assigned to it.

The development of the last layer was the most challenging part, and that took the majority of the dedicated time for this project and required the most important decisions from both our part and Miss Cake’s team.