Gregory’s (IoT) Online Ordering to Physical Stores

A project for one of the largest fast food and coffee chains in Greece.

The scope was to build a new e-commerce platform for the consumer to place orders at their nearest store.

As a project manager/solution architect, I handled an internal team of 2 engineers and a UI/UX designer. The challenge with this project was to design a solution that will allow users to place an order on the platform, after browsing the products, and to be fulfilled by the closest store based on the user’s address. The order should be printed inside the store on a thermal printer, following a specific template. Furthermore, as the products were mainly coffees and snacks, timing was critical. It should have taken no more than 15 minutes for the order to arrive.

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We built an innovative UI, accommodating all potential coffee attribute combinations. For the order management part, we used a Microsoft Azure queue implementation, where every store had a printer with an Arduino, attached also to the local router.

The Arduino was connected to the internet via cable with the router present, so each device was able to listen to its own queue, present on the Azure cloud.

The portal would use shortest path first algorithms along with Google Maps traffic data to locate the nearest store and would then format the digital order to printer language, place it on the respective queue, the in-store Arduino device would pick it up and propagate it to the thermal printer in order for the personnel to prepare it. 

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Overall, it was a challenging project, with various technologies used and an E2E eCommerce journey which seamlessly joined the digital world with the physical. 

It required a long period of user testing as every store had a different setup and we needed to make sure that the overall implementation would work in every case.

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