Summer Game Prize Fulfillment Workflow

Wed, 08/10/2011 - 3:16pm by eby

The AADL Summer Game has an online shop where earned points can be spent on awesome schwag. To try to make it easy for the volunteers and staff to fulfill the orders we took advantage of some of the infrastructure we already had in place for other parts of the site.

As some know our hold notices currently go through a script that sends an email along with printing a custom label to a label printer, that is used for identification on our hold shelves. We reused this process to print a custom pickup/order label every time an order comes through the ubercart game shop by hooking into the payment process. This leaves a spool of order labels that those doing fulfillment can pick up throughout the week and start filling. A spool that has been increasing dramatically in length. This makes it easy for the shop keepers to keep on top of all the orders and properly mark the bags for pickup.

As orders are filled the barcode on the custom label is scanned, which sets the order as fulfilled and adds a notification job to a redis queue. Players have the option of getting SMS notifications (sent through Twilio) or email. Shop keepers can also cancel orders if need be which refunds the points to the player account.

After the items are delivered to the branch destinations on Friday morning, a script goes through the jobs on the redis queue and sends the notifications letting players know their items are ready for pickup.

More background info on our Summer Game is in the works and keep that order spool growing!

Comments

I've always wondered how you

I've always wondered how you guys manage all of the orders. Now, I know how!

That is sooo cool!!!! And

That is sooo cool!!!! And very interesting!!!

So cool! I think the order

So cool! I think the order label machine is really cool!

cool

You guys are amazing! Thanks

You guys are amazing! Thanks for explaining the process and how you tied together existing technologies to make things work.

Thank you so much for doing

Thank you so much for doing this for us!

This all seems pretty

This all seems pretty high-tech and complicated. Thanks for making all this possible!

How in the world do all of

How in the world do all of these systems and computer codes(not summer game codes) work together, because they sound really cool. Keep up with the behind-the-scenes looks!

That's amazing! Technology is

That's amazing! Technology is really a wonderful thing. :D

This is great! I already

This is great! I already liked the way our library processed holds and now it's using that same technology for summer game prizes. Very Efficient!

Thanks for showing us this.

Thanks for showing us this. I've always wondered how Summer Game worked.

It's amazing how the summer

It's amazing how the summer game has to buy so much items, and everyone gets their prize they buy.

And it's all funded by

And it's all funded by Friends of the Ann Arbor District Library. Thank you FAADL!

The FAADL is really amazing.

I wonder where they come up

I wonder where they come up with all the money...

Probably from the

Probably from the government....

And from taxes...

Nope, the Friends of the AADL

Nope, the Friends of the AADL do not get money from the government or taxes. FAADL funds its operations and its donations to AADL by collecting and selling used books in the FAADL bookshop at the downtown library! So when you shop at the Friends Bookshop, you're funding next year's summer game shop among many other awesome activities AADL wouldn't otherwise be able to support,

Oh. That is so cool! I can't

Oh. That is so cool! I can't believe so much money comes from books!!

Yeah，and even when you buy

Yeah，and even when you buy the books, they are really cheap.

Thanks for explaning that for

Thanks for explaning that for me!

I noticed the label on my

I noticed the label on my item was VERY familiar

Thank you so much for doing

Thank you so much for doing this! It's very fun.

Seems like a very efficient

Seems like a very efficient system!

Sounds very efficient.

cool, thanks

If my order says completed

If my order says completed under order history, but I didn't get an email or text, does that mean it's ready for pickup?

Wow, shreeman1999 actually

Wow, shreeman1999 actually posted something other than "awesome!"

Very interesting!

This is very interesting. So

This is very interesting. So does the AADL have programmers on staff to set stuff like this up?

Cool! does it make it easier

Cool! does it make it easier to buy stuff?

So now I know how you get the

So now I know how you get the orders and give them to us!

Cool!

Great! I can't wait to see

Great! I can't wait to see the stuff I've ordered.

I'm sad that there's no new

I'm sad that there's no new blog post. :(

I agree, LuckyDuck. I need

I agree, LuckyDuck. I need some help on where to start with the AA Police Badger badges! ;-)

I'm sure the new blog post

I'm sure the new blog post will be coming soon. There are new police badges up and ready to be found, you can start looking here: http://aapd.aadl.org/
There are also several other new badges including an A-Team badge and a Kevin Bacon badge

If a coder gets his/her wings

If a coder gets his/her wings every time a label is printed, there must be lots of flying code monkeys by this point!

Sorry for the delay guys! To

Sorry for the delay guys! To answer a question, yup, all this stuff was developed by AADL's IT staff, but we use a lot of open source code so we're rarely starting from scratch. As for the blog post, it's coming, I got a little behind tonight what with the 6 NEW SHOP ITEMS! Stay tuned!

-[:eli]