Clever Geek Handbook

We make a cloud service for managing supplies (Angular + Firebase)





The problem is mess



It was Thursday. The end of July. Misha slowly walked along a warm street to the office from the nearest cafe where he had just had lunch. The mobile rang. Sveta called - a girl from the first line of technical support.



“Misha, where are you going? On you in the service desk there are 3 tasks for replacing cartridges. Afanasyeva called from the crew, she urgently needs to print, she has been waiting for an hour ”- Sveta was on the platoon.



“Now I’ll change, 5 minutes” - Misha accelerated.



For a year, Misha worked as an employee of the IT department in the office of a large wholesale company. Misha’s duties included, among other things, replacing cartridges in approximately 50 printers in the office.



When hiring, the boss asked, “Michael, can you establish a normal process for replacing cartridges?” Well, that there would always be a replacement in the warehouse and everything changed quickly? Yes? Well, ok, let's organize. ”



Misha organized everything. He had the Consumables.xlsx file on his desktop, there were several labels: printers, cartridges for them, leftovers in the warehouse, etc. Misha kept records, in the warehouse he had a separate rack where cartridges by models lay neatly on the shelves. Chef praised.



Misha quickly approached the office and immediately went to the basement to the consumables warehouse. He remembered the model of the Afanasyeva printer. After 5 minutes, he was on the 4th floor in the calculated part.



“We have not been able to print references for an hour, people are waiting where you go ?!” the accountant was out of sorts.

“Now, now everything will be. Damn, do you have a different printer or something? ”- Misha realized that they had brought the wrong cartridge.

“Yes, a month ago they changed it. You don’t know who is doing what in your IT. ”



Misha turned and ran to the warehouse for the “right” cartridge.



Afanasyeva dialed the number of the chief of IT - “Boris, well, when you have already put things in order, I can’t print in the morning.” “Give me the key to your warehouse, I’ll go down and change everything.”



The idea is how to put things in order.



How often do you encounter the fact that you need to change the consumables in the equipment and you do not have information on how to do this and where exactly to take this consumable.



A cartridge, batteries, a disk in a raid array of a server, a filter in a kettle, coffee in a coffee machine, ...

We begin to look for a specialist who knows how to do this, but he left or is busy, we wait, we look for information on the Internet and so on. Everything results in huge loss of time.



How to make everything faster and easier?



The idea is that there is a QR code label on the equipment.

We scan the code, a page opens with information about equipment, supplies, the warehouse where they are located, and support contacts.



Employees of the IT department can stick these labels for example on printers and tell users - guys, if you have run out of a cartridge, you can always quickly change it yourself, scan the QR code and there will be all the necessary information for this: the cartridge model and where the warehouse is located.



Or we glue QR on the server. When a drive fails in an array, we don’t need to ask the system administrator what kind of drives it is. We scan the code and here is all the information.



Implementation - putting things in order



We make everything simple, we need:





We will bring order to the masses - the system will be cloudy with a web interface.

We implement the interface on Angular .

We do the backend service on Firebase .

Label printing will help the Pdfmake library.



We realize lists of equipment and supplies in the form of cards:







For equipment, we can specify the consumables that are used in it, the number of devices and a link to the documentation:







We make a form for other information:







We realize label printing in pdf file:







We stick labels on the equipment:







The result of scanning the QR code in the browser on the phone:







The next step - continue to increase efficiency



These things have not yet been implemented, but they seem to me a logical continuation of what was done:





I will be glad to see in the comments your opinion on this idea, implementation and further development steps.



Thanks for attention!


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