Client

Malavika Attaluri, Vice President of Activities, Guild of Visual Arts at Cornell University
Email: <mpa46@cornell.edu>

Advisors

Jennifer Fuhrer, Vice President of Communications
Email: <jlf297@cornell.edu>

Tom Silva, Faculty Advisor
Email: <ts21@cornell.edu>

Student contact

Stephanie Sinwell, <sas575@cornell.edu>,is setting up a team for this project. If you are interested in joining the team, please contact her.

About the Organization

The Guild of Visual Arts (GVA) exists to give artists a strong on-campus community where they can develop their skills in a positive group setting. The Guild of Visual Arts aims to connect individuals with artistic interests with one another and provide a forum for members to share their ideas and skills. GVA holds events that allow our members to interact with several artistic mediums, which encourages depth and diversity in artistic expression.

Project Goals

In order to hold a diverse array of art workshops, GVA owns a multitude of art supplies. At the beginning of each semester more items are purchased for the organization, and slowly throughout the semester supplies are used in small quantities. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain an accurate record of what supplies are owned. Currently, inventory is maintained by manually editing a Google Spreadsheet that is updated when all the supplies are received. They are loosely organized by category (Paint, Paper, Fabrics/Crafts, etc.) and the physical supplies are placed in the respective box. The spreadsheet is then theoretically manually updated after each event by an officer, but this is often neglected due to the tedious nature of editing the spreadsheet. Therefore, the inventory spreadsheet is only a loose estimate of what GVA truly has in supply. Problems that have arised from this include difficulty ensuring planned events are adequately supplied, tracking theft issues from students sharing the storage space, and knowing what new supplies need to be purchased.

To solve these issues, GVA wants a Inventory Tracking Application that will provide an easy-to-use system to accurately maintain the inventory at all times of club operation. It will be designed for both a mass updates of supplies, as well as small incremental updates.

Project Summary

As mentioned above, we would like the team to create an inventory tracking web application. The core features of this system include:

1. Addition and tagging of items
   • The most important feature of this app is the ability to add items. When adding items, we want to be able to input the item's name, its current quantity at the time of addition, and a tag for the item (i.e. "painting supplies", "sculpting", etc).
   • All items should have unique names. If we try to create an item with the same name, the app should ask if we want to merge their quantities, rename one of the items, or cancel the addition altogether.
   • We would also like to have an easy way to add a large number of items at once, rather than adding one at a time. How this system is specifically designed, however, is relatively open-ended.
2. Inventory list
   • We would like to have a view of all the items in our inventory. Additionally, we should be able to filter this inventory list, so that we can view only items with a certain tag.
3. Item lookup
   • We also want to be able to search for items; we should be able to enter a keyword, and the search will bring up anything with that keyword in its item name (for example, searching for "canvas" should bring up "8x10 Canvas", "6x6 Canvas", etc).
   • When looking up an item, we should be able to see its quantity and tag as well.
4. Inventory update
   • After our events, we would like to be able to input a list of the items and the quantity used. The app will then use that list to automatically update the quantities of those items in the system.

In addition to the core features, it would be nice for the application to have some additional features. However, emphasis should be placed on the implementation of the core features; if one of the following specifications are not met, we would still be happy with the final product!

1. Potential/upcoming event tracker. This feature would keep track of all potential future GVA events. When an event is added, the required information from the user would be an event name, a list of the items necessary to run the event, and the estimated quantities of those items. The system could then compare the event's required quantities to the quantity in inventory, determine if the event is possible to hold, and display this information to the user.
2. Item purchase list, It would be great to have a feature that tracks all the items that will soon require repurchase. When an item's quantity runs low, it would appear on this list.
3. Text parser that translates Amazon receipts to inventory data. This will make it easier for officers to mass update the inventory after a supply haul. It would create an easily editable list of supplies that can be directly uploaded to the repository.
4. Item usage tracker. Contrasts the anticipated quantity of supplies used at an event with what was actually used up.
5. Mobile app for small inventory updates. An Android/iOS compatible app that makes it easier to for officers to update what supplies were used after each event.

Of these, the most helpful features would be (1), (2), and (3). The last two, while beneficial tous, are not as necessary to implement. The team is also welcome to suggest any additionalfeatures they think may be useful.