HomeWork Cafe – Order to your desk

Stuck on a call for hours and fancy a coffee? Some enhanced online functionality in HomeWork is just for you.

There are several SaaS technologies used here at HomeWork to make life as efficient as possible for members and staff alike including services for; workspace management; point of sale; online payments; integration platforms; notifications services; reporting & auditing; and many more.

This is great for out of the box use but I also want to make the experience at HomeWork more convenient, fun and innovative.

So we have created a bespoke online ‘Cafe Order’ tool that links some of our existing services together to allow you to order your favourite hot beverage from the comfort of your desk!

MVP capabilities include ordering but also ability to geo-fence (limit use to members on-site), be active within normal operational hours only, ability to stop service if operationally it’s not running and a maintainable product list.

Our very own Southfields barista, Oz, had been doing online courses over lockdown to learn front-end coding, specifically React, so this is a perfect introduction to a production application. Once built we were able to inject this widget into the existing members portal, the bonus being automatically knows who you are!

For the backend, I’m using the very versatile Pipedream, I created an endpoint for submission and along with some authentication, audit & logging, some custom action components, error handling/notifications and integrations into the existing services – the order will be added to your tab. I was very quickly able able to ping a notification of new orders to the cafe, log details and add to a members’ tab. And there we have it, a MVP version ready for use!

We are already thinking about future functionality including realtime tracking, barista acceptance & closing, add food items, personal favourites, gifting, loyalty & scheduled drinks.

Try it out here (you will need to be on-site and have access to the members portal!)