Project Term: Fall 2019

Progressive Sanitation, a sanitation supply company based in Brandon, Manitoba, experienced a high administrative burden managing its paper-based ordering process. The supply company worked with BIT and BTM students at the ACE Project Space to streamline the process. The student team created a series of applications to digitize, simplify and centralize administration, billing, and driver routing.

Digitizing paper-based processes for a streamlined workflow

Before Progressive Sanitation approached the ACE Project Space, the company’s administrative staff were processing orders through email, fax, phone, and text. The orders were entered manually into QuickBooks Enterprise after which packing slips were printed out for each order and handed over to the driver for loading and delivery. Once packing slips were signed by each client, they had to be returned to the office with manual entry for invoicing. All the associated manual entries and transfers resulted in excessive paperwork and loss of packing slips during transfers.

The student team assigned to Progressive Sanitation created applications for administration, billing, and routing resulting in reductions in paperwork for the company’s staff, fewer losses in packing slips, better route prioritization, and improvements in billing work.

Deliverables

The Progressive Sanitation team completed the following deliverables for the project during the fall term at the ACE Project Space:

• Administration app
• Billing Manager
• Driver app

What our students are saying

“Project space helped me to gain a lot of professional work experience. I developed leadership, interpersonal and business skills during this 4-month term. Dealing with clients and working for a company developed professional attitude which will help me to build my career as well. Creating different kind of documents has enhanced my capability to think differently in every situation.” – Parul Kansal

“I learned that coding in new languages can be difficult to figure out first. But pushing past the confusing and difficult parts can improve you as a programmer. I learned how to think differently in certain scenarios by using different languages.” – Garett Friesen

“While in the project space I had practiced using different communication skills like listening, clarifying and summarizing. For example, I had practiced during a client meeting where I had to explain different technical topics to a person who would have a hard time understanding what I was talking about. This is a major skill that would be useful in my later career in the IT industry.” – Austin Reimer

“Work progression is what I’ve learned during my time within the project space. This really entails that working diligently on one part of the project, builds up into another part of the project and so on and so forth. This also means that teamwork is a part of the work process and we, as a team, must allow ourselves to progress to each stage of the project, even if the work gets tough.

I also learned about dealing with clientele. This really means that I would answer each and every question thrown at me without hesitation. I also began to deal with the environments of which the clientele is. Such as if the clientele lives very far and we must deal with doing our meetings remotely.” – Janeal Pimentel

Technologies used

• Visual Studio Code
• AWS Account
• git
• npm
• yarn
• Discord
• WebEx teams
• Serverless
• ES6 JavaScript Babel
• NodeJS
• ReactJS
• Python

Orders Screen

Deliveries Screen

Notes Dialog Box