Project Highlights:
- Creating a unified solution for bar management using a PWA
- Leveraging integration with POS systems to provide detailed analytics
- Automated Business Intelligence reporting in PDF and XLS
- Customizable digital menu development
Draft Beverage Management Platform Providing Data Analytics for Bars
and Restaurants
Client and Business Goals:
The vision of the BarTrack founders was to revolutionize the Hospitality industry, specifically focusing on draft beverage programs – the result being an innovative IoT solution for automating inventory management, increasing keg yields, and helping owners make more informed data-driven business decisions. Over the years, Brett Danielson and his team have raised several rounds of investments and extended the product to provide venues with a fully integrated platform for managing their draft beverage programs – that is where the starting point for cooperation with MobiDev began.
Product Description:
BarTrack is a fully integrated IoT solution that provides bars, breweries, and restaurants a platform where they can have real-time insights into their draft system, inventory levels, and operational efficiencies. This is all made possible with a proprietary hardware solution which utilizes a non-intrusive beverage sensor that measures product volume and various system conditions such as temperature and pressure. Through an integration with the customer’s Point of Sale system, detailed analytics is available that provides the customer with an hourly breakdown of where, when and under what conditions losses occurred.
Applied Technologies:
Analytics app: React.js, Node.js (Express), PostgreSQL, Sequelize, Puppeteer for PDF reports generation, Google Cloud (Sheets API, Drive API) for XLS reports generation, AWS (S3), Cron Jobs
Main app(PWA): React.js (PWA), MobX-state-tree, Material UI, realtime updates (WebSockets)
Digital Menu app: Next.js, TypeScript, MobX-state-tree, realtime updates (WebSockets)
PoS Integration app: Node.js (Express); PostgreSQL, Sequelize, Puppeteer, Cron Jobs
Main Bartrack Server (developed by client’s in-house team): Node.js (Express)
Creating a unified solution for bar management using a PWA
One of the primary challenges faced was identifying a solution that satisfied the need of providing a single bar management platform for different types of devices. Users needed to be able to switch between locations and view real-time data such as Keg Levels, Inventory, and Temperature/Pressure using their desktops, tablets, or smartphones all while having a uniform experience across the various environments – a Progressive Web Application was chosen.
Leveraging integration with POS systems to provide detailed analytics
One of the primary strategic goals was to compare internal BarTrack pour data with external sales data as it provides the foundation for detailed analytics and understanding of operational efficiencies. We built integrations with several of the most widely used POS systems where we had to devise complex ETL processes to get the data that BarTrack needed for their downstream analysis. Once the data is in the BarTrack system the Hourly Reports provide customers with the ability to track relevant KPIs, with a particular focus on comparing pour versus sales for each beverage – enabling them to promptly identify waste and develop an action plan for remedying the issue(s).
Automated Business Intelligence reporting in PDF and XLS
The expansive set of internal and external historical data allowed us to develop a BI solution for providing customers with unique Daily, Weekly, and Monthly reports in both PDF and XLS options. One of the biggest challenges of developing these reports was creating a clear and concise structure for the reports so that users could easily digest the large amount of diverse data that they previously had never been exposed to.
Creating a scalable Digital Menu solution
BarTrack is uniquely situated in a position where they have the real-time beverage information for each customer – one of the requests from their user base was to display this externally on TV menus. Following the principles of Sustainable Design, we developed a Digital Menu solution for BarTrack. The focus of this project was on providing a fully customizable, real-time view of the beverages a customer has on-tap – displayed on TV screens in their taprooms.
Real- time
quality management
Integration
with PoS systems
Automated BI
reporting, analytics, re-ordering
