Inspiration
In our home town Ljubljana, there is a lot of small food businesses like bakeries, coffeeshops and restaurants. The struggle for them to keep up with taxes and big food chains is made even harder by all the food waste they experience due to more fluctuating visitation rate. At the same time, we believe we should be doing more concerning the overall food waste as it is a huge problem of modern society.
What it does
It helps business managers keep track of the product demand based on time of the year, month, day of the week or even hours during the day so they can prepare an appropriate supply of specific products. They have an option of looking at overall visualisations based on their past orders, or plan their stock using predicted demand per product on a daily, weekly or monthly level. They can keep adding data to improve predictions via report.
How we built it
Web application is built in Django and uses Google Charts as the base for visualisations. For machine learning there are two separate algorithms - linear regression and a neural network.
Challenges we ran into
There was no appropriate data or API available online, so we simulated it using web order and visitation rate statistics. As there was also no order system available for us to connect to our platform, the user has to add the data manually - in an ideal world the tracking could be done automatically as orders are placed. Machine learning is no piece of cake either and we started learning about machine learning from scratch.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We implemented machine learning algorithms which was a first for both of us and even though the predictions could be improved, that is mostly due to the whole data issue, lack of time and inexperience. Also we learned so much and though there were just two of us managed to produce something that actually looks nice.
What we learned
Too much to describe in Markdown. :P
What's next for SupplyCAT
Connecting the platform to orders system to get better data, complete the neural network. We're also thinking of adding some other functionality, like option to trade excessive products with other businesses close by.
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