Case Study

Cashless Operations in Canteen and Mess

Rishihood University
Problem Statement by Customer icon

Problem Statement of Customer

The University was a recently established one and had a fledgling canteen and mess where all operations were conducted with cash. So far operations were possible to conduct because user numbers were very small. Anticipating growth of numbers, lack of control of the outsourced vendors and leakage of money, they asked us to design and install a cashless operation system that worked with our proximity card and which could later be expanded to encompass Attendance, Transport and Library solutions.

Our Findings

Our Findings

The university did not want to be part of the payment cycle for compliance reasons and were having conflicting views between accounts and administration on aspects of taxation and food wastage.

Construct ofarchitecture icon

Construct of solution architecture

"We provided a mobile app to each student enabling online placement of advance orders on the canteen The app we provided was able to support the following instances Part order fullfillment / Refusal of order / Inventory Planing / More efficient order prepartion / Saving on man power for collecting & administering cash"

Our Findings

Realities on ground and how they were overcome during installation and commissioning

University was not clear about who would be the custodian of the amount collected as advances. To sort this issue, instead of charging NFC closed loop cards, management decided to make payment against each order on real time basis THROUGH A THIRD PARTY PAYMENT GATEWAY. It seems very easy but the biggest issue was to do the payment gateway integration provided by client with mobile app.

Conclusion and recommendations

Conclusion and recommendations given to management for future improvements

The conclusion is for future solutions to similar institutions, client must be sensitized to decide whether to use closed loop cards or payment gateways and share completely different timelines based on their decision at the onset.

NFC Story

The “Assistance Control” project was inspired by the basic idea of the “Bologna Process”, a Pan-European collaboration which started in 1999, to adapt technology to provide a better quality of education that would allow improvement of the next generation of classroom teaching.
The best project finally chosen and tested involved students registered for classes with NFC phones, during the academic year 2011–2012 at “Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Campus Madrid” (UPSAM).
This resulted in the senior students at the School of Computer Engineering to certify 99.5% accuracy and ease of attendance that ensured continuous assessment without loss of instructional time allocated to this activity.

Source : Science Direct Volume 40 Issue 11, 1st September 2013, Pages 4478-4489