Dynamically Priced Bakery Management System
2024
This is management system (customers and stock) I built for a fictional bakery as part of my Computer Science A Level in C#. I added dynamic pricing (like Uber’s surge pricing), adjusting product costs in real-time, all aimed at reducing waste and improving profitability.
Source code: https://github.com/pavlips/DynamicallyPricedBakery
How It Works
The system uses recent sales data, weather conditions via the OpenWeatherMap API and ongoing promotional events to dynamically adjust bakery prices. It also gives discounts based on a customer loyalty program which creates custom QR codes (using ZXing.NET) and scans them (using AForge.NET) for easy identification. Least squares regression is used to predict when the stock price will fall to zero, and the program adjusts the prices accordingly. So if its projected to become zero early in the day, the program increases the price so less customers buy the product. Likewise, if its projected to happen late in the day (or not at all), the program decreases price so more customers buy the product. This means a higher profit for businesses, as well as less waste. Aditionally, weather conditions give a multiplier due to customer footfall changing as a result of them. The business owner can then generate different reports to judge the effectiveness of the pricing strategy and loyalty program.
It’s really tricky to explain all of its functionality. Below is a simple video I made when submitting the project going through them. The list of test cases is long so it won’t be added here, but it shows off the entire application.
Testing video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk9B4qvwK6E
What Next?
Some ideas of what to explore to improve this project:
- Use more complex algorithms like an exponential moving average for the rate of sales. Again, I couldn’t implement it due to time constraints, but it would work a lot better for identifying trends.
- Implement promotions targetted specifically at certain customer loyalty levels, giving them further discounts.
- Create a more modern UI through another front end framework (Blazor?).
- Develop more complex analysis of pricing strategies to make it easier for the business owner to identify their next action.