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Inspiration

This was inspired by a need to support the community and small businesses, specifically craft fair and food truck business. We wanted to build a cost-effective and portable tool for creators, artists, bakers, and cooks to help manage materials, costs, and sales for them.

Main focus: minimize platform cost and maximize portability

What it does

1st generation

Our system lets owners store:

raw materials with information about individual costs,
built product with information about labor time and raw materials were used
customer information with which products were purchased.

It uses this information to provide a dashboard with low stock alerts and pricing recommendations based on labor costs and selected profit margin.

How we built it

We built it on AWS with a RDS mysql database and EC2 server and a front end with javascript. The database has 3 main tables: customers, stocks, and materials, and 2 junction table to link all of the data.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into permissions challenges on AWS, we had to do a lot of work with security groups so that all of our components could talk to each other.
We ran into some major challenges with connecting our frontend to our backend. The API development was a new area for all of us, so it was really cool to learn, but quite a challenge to build.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was a challenging project because it was full stack. We are really proud that we were able to build out the database and we are really proud of our user interface.

We are all first time hackers and we are really proud of what we've built for our first time.

What we learned

We learned a lot about how much work goes into infructure setup. We also learned about how to build APIs and the different types of API types to use.

What's next for Invent-ory

2nd generation

The second generation of our product would act as a personal assistant to business owners. We want to integration AI or smart analytics to make recommendations to owners about what stock to build based on material inventories or events scheduled.