Inspiration
We chose this challenge by SAP because we believe that the problem is realistic and building the software for it would be a great way to learn new tech while working on a meaningful project that might benefit businesses.
What it does
We built a website where users can upload .csv file that includes the list of appointments where each line includes: booking time, appointment time, and car type for a tire-changing business. The software will then run an algorithm in the backend where it will optimize the revenue by choosing the most optimal way to organize schedules. It will then display the schedules of each day and the time of each bay when it receives a car. Finally, it will display a graph of revenue each day and the amount of money lost (when the business refuses a potential customer).
How we built it
The website comprises 2 parts: frontend and backend. The front end is built using React and Bootstrap while the backend uses Python with Flask and Cockcroach DB to store the database. For the algorithm, we used statistics to optimize the revenue and different data structures and algorithms.
Challenges we ran into
The main challenge of this topic is how to optimize revenue. At first, we tried to come up with a pure logical algorithm to optimize it and we were thinking of using Dynamic Programming where we consider all the possibilities and use a cache to keep track of the choices we went through. However, this approach is not practical since the data is too large and there are many constraints from the question that limit us from using Dynamic Programming. For instance, the question states that there must be at least 1 bay available for each car type, sophisticating the problem by a lot.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Firstly, we are really impressed that we were able to build a complex program in such a short period of time. Apart from that, collaborating with others while coding is also a big challenge that we turned out to do quite well since we didn't have many conflicts and were able to resolve them easily.
What we learned
After chatting after finishing, we realized how productive we were, making us realize how high our limits are. We stayed up for almost 2 days straight which really challenged our endurance.
What's next for SAP Challenge - Revenue Optimization Software
We'll continue what we're passionate at: using technologies to solve real-life world problems. As university students, we will continue to immerse ourselves in the never-ending learning journey and hopefully we can build more and more cool projects :)
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