Fundación Banco de Alimentos

Fundación Banco de Alimentos

It is the first food bank in Argentina, concentrating its activity in the city of Buenos Aires and suburban areas. It aids 679 social organizations, feeds over 78,000 people and distributes 255 tons of food monthly.

Brief description of the organization

Fundación Banco de Alimentos (The Food Bank Foundation) is a non-profit organization that acts as a bridge between people afflicted by hunger, along with the institutions that aid them, and the food industry and individual donors who to donate and cooperate with the cause.
It is the first food bank in Argentina, concentrating its activity in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires and suburban areas of Buenos Aires. It aids 679 social organizations, feeds over 78,000 people and distributes 255 tons of food monthly. 80% of the people who benefits from the food is under the age of 13 years old. The organization has 400 active volunteers.

The challenge

The organization had a complex stock management system that handled and controlled the reception and distribution of all the donations received by the foundation.
They needed a web interface for their internal systems where social organizations could place orders and track the status over the whole process using a web browser in order to the slow telephone system.
The Foundation needed a social network platform to help organizations work along with each other, sharing information and resources.
The Foundation also needed to redesign their processes to support the new web stock system.

Solution

Hexacta used Drupal to develop a set of tailored PHP modules on top of it, to provide a web interface to the organization’s internal systems.
The new modules that enabled social interactions were deployed and setup to meet the Foundation’s needs.
The entire order placement and follow up process was redesigned and optimized to comply with the new web interface system.
A reporting module was designed and developed to provide real time information related to order placement.
High performance, as a consequence of the client’s hardware limitations, was stressed during the whole project.

Applied technologies

  • PHP
  • Eclipse PDT
  • TFS for ALM
  • TFS Everywhere integrating
  • TFS with Eclipse
  • Drupal
  • MySql
  • IIS