St. Joseph's Food Program

St Josephs Food Program Custom Software Solution

Solution Components:

  • Security for Client Identity Protection
  • Client Application and renewals
  • Client activity management
  • Administration & Reporting
  • Client Demographics
  • Client Financials
  • Bar-coded Family Food Cards
  • Community program referrals
  • Inventory Tracking
  

Technologies:

  • C#.NET
  • .NET 3.5 Framework
  • WPF
  • MS Reporting Services
  • SQL Server

Needs:

  • Secure, stable tracking of client activity
  • Statistics on program client demographics

Challenges:

The St. Joseph Food Program is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, non-sectarian organization that has operated since 1982. They distribute 30 tons of fresh food and non-perishable items to men, women, children, elderly, working poor, and temporarily unemployed. Volunteers facilitate the distribution of food by driving trucks, making daily stops at grocery stores, food marts and other pick up donation sites. They are funded by cash and food donations from individuals, churches, businesses and foundations.

St. Joseph Food Pantry utilized an Access database to manage the clients accepted into the program and the client’s food pickup records. The Access database was originally developed by college students with design flaws. St Joe’s was unable to resolve performance issues, data validations, and data loss that occurred within the application. The application’s data was not reliable and the database’s performance was a significant problem.

Solution:

Avastone assisted St. Joseph’s Food Panty through the grant process, providing information regarding the issues with their current system and the benefits an updated system would have to the Pantry’s internal processes. Avastone participated in the grant application interviews resulting in the approval of monetary funds to continue with the project.

The project started with several meetings with St. Joseph’s Food Pantry, stepping through procedures, identifying components of the proposed custom software application needed to support and enhance the client interview and tracking process. From the functional specifications, a high level design was developed along with a project plan for construction of the custom software application. Avastone took the software development process and broke it down into iterations to allow for testable units as programming was completed within a multi-year budget plan. Detailed time estimates were placed on each task within the iterations in order to provide a means to fund the work effort.

The completed solution was within the funded budget and met the project goals to improve the application’s stability by converting to a robust Windows-based .Net application and secure the food programs client information. New functionality to trace the client activities and generate various types of reports greatly increased the efficiency and accuracy of the St Joseph Food Program(s).

Impact:

  • Needed reports were readily available
  • Increased accuracy of client activity
  • Improved efficiency of managing program