BusinessBuddy

You think about starting your business, and we help grow it. Track your business's progress with our visualisation-enabled solution!

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Inspiration

Restaurants are the most popular business - but also the most likely to be shut in the early stages. Our solution allows businesses to track their growth on a daily basis and hence enhance their progress.

How we built it

We used Azure functions to build two functions: a data feeder and a data analysis function.

The first flow focuses on the data feeder function. We are pushing the live transactional data from NCR APIs including historic data to CosmosDB in Azure using Azure function Apps. The data stored in the CosmosDB consists of the item information and transaction summary.

The second flow focuses on data analysis. Power BI is connected to an API (coded in the second Azure function i.e. the data analysis function). This API gets restaurant statistics such as profit for the week, the most sold item, number of transactions per day, etc. We use Power BI visualization to present these statistics to the end-user (owner of the restaurant, in this example) in a manner that they would understand.

The third flow consists of an Azure LogicApp sending the restaurant statistics in an email to the owner periodically. The LogicApp builds a scheduler which sends these mails to the owner at a given time period.

Challenges we ran into

Getting data into the CosmosDB using the NCR APIs was a challenge, as it took us a long time. It was also equally difficult to build the data analysis Azure function, which analyzed the data in CosmosDB.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Using the NCR APIs successfully with CosmosDB was challenging and we are proud we were able to accomplish that feat. We are also proud that we were able to use more than just one Azure functionality (using LogicApps, Azure Functions, CosmosDB) and also use Power BI.

What's next for BusinessBuddy

We aim to analyze more transaction data and come up with more statistics to analyze user data. We also aim to increase the applicability of this solution and diversify from restaurants to other businesses as well.

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