Vending Machine Management System
VENDING MACHINE SYSTEM |
Summary
When Prism Systems, Inc. implemented a vending machine controller containing a cellular modem; it was apparent a vending management system would be necessary for facilitating communication with the vending machines. At the time our controller was installed, a vending management system was in place to manage the controller. This consisted of a website, an iOS application, and several Windows services to support communication with the vending machines. This first version of the system was admirable, but the website and Windows services were unstable and buggy. It was obvious a revision to the vending management system was needed.
Solutions
The Prism team completely redesigned the utilized Windows services to eliminate issues our clients experienced with the first system version. The combination of multiple connections to the database and poor thread management caused numerous memory leaks and eventually caused the service to crash. The solution to these issues was straightforward:
Serialize the database interface and only maintain one or two connections to the database.
Implement a better thread management system, ensuring all threads were created and disposed of correctly.
Our team also completely redesigned the website using ASP.NET MVC. We designed this new website around the owners of the vending machines and their unique needs. The following is a list of the various features implemented in the new website:
Comprehensive reporting system, including charts and tabular data
User dashboard to quickly assess sales data for each machine
User-friendly interface
Support ticketing system for direct interfacing between owners and support technicians
Additional machine details are displayed to the user
Full documentation on how to use the website
Finally, we revised the iOS application to present the user with newly available data in the database.
Customer Benefits
System stability and up-time
Owners can now access more data on their machines
Sales data is readily accessible
iOS application presents a similar interface to the user
Technologies
C#/.NET
ASP .NET MVC
jQuery
Bootstrap
Objective C with xCode
