Catering yönetim paneli

The Catering Management Panel is a management application I prepared to bring catering processes into a single panel, from buying fruit, vegetables and raw materials to cooking meals and then selling and delivering them to institutions. I am developing the project for Makdos, based on the needs of a catering company. The current version is a showcase panel in which every screen and workflow runs on sample data. My aim is to go through the screens together with the company's teams before moving to the real system, and to collect their feedback at this stage.

Purpose

In a catering company, the day's work consists of steps that are tightly linked to each other. The raw materials in a recipe shape the menu, the menu and institutional orders turn into production orders, and production needs give rise to purchase suggestions. When these steps are kept in separate notebooks and spreadsheets, a change in one place reaches the others late, and cost and stock figures lose their reliability.

I designed this panel to set up a flow in which the information entered at each step passes automatically to the next one. By adding quality processes such as food safety, portion control and audits to the same panel, I aimed to let the company follow both its production and its legal obligations from a single place.

How it works

The panel opens with an overview screen I call My Dashboard. It shows the day's orders, production progress, raw material cost, waste rate, charts for the last thirty days, and the day's events such as temperature deviations or goods receipt results. Cards can be moved, enlarged and removed, and new indicators or charts can be added. Every chart can also be read as a table, so users who find it hard to tell chart colours apart still get the same information.

The panel consists of twenty-six screens grouped into eight categories, and each screen is divided into sub-tabs. There are five sample roles, namely manager, head chef, purchasing, quality and sales, and each role sees only the screens related to its own work.

The showcase version has no server or API. The screens run in the browser with sample data, and any changes are stored only in that browser. Users can return to the sample data at any time from the settings screen. I chose this approach deliberately, because the company's teams can try the panel as if they were really using it, without any data being permanently affected.

Key features

• On the Menu Planning screen a weekly menu grid is prepared, copied from the previous week, approved and printed, and calorie limits are checked for diet menus.
• When raw materials, net quantities and waste are entered on a recipe card, cost, calories and allergen information are calculated automatically.
• The Special Diet Requests screen tracks people who need gluten-free, lactose-free or diabetic meals or who have allergies, and produces a separate plate list for those who conflict with the day's menu.
• The Production Plan creates production orders from the menu and orders and compares raw material needs with stock.
• The purchasing flow moves from suggestion to order, from approval to receipt, and received goods enter stock as lots.
• The Warehouse and Stock screen follows FEFO order, meaning the item with the nearest expiry date goes out first, and also covers goods receipt, stock counts and waste records.
• The Food Safety screen follows temperature records, sample retention and cleaning lists within the scope of HACCP, that is, hazard analysis and critical control points.
• On the Portion and Weight screen, weighing checks are evaluated within a defined tolerance.
• The Audits screen plans internal, supplier, customer and official audits, and findings and corrective actions are tracked against their due dates.
• The Institutions and Contracts screen keeps delivery times, working days, prices per menu type and contract end dates.
• The Tenders and Quotes screen calculates a quote price based on portion cost and tracks the win rate.
• The Distribution, Containers and Thermoboxes, and Equipment and Maintenance screens track vehicle routes, transport temperatures, containers left at institutions, and overdue maintenance.
• Customer feedback cannot be closed until a corrective action has been written.
• The Cost and Profitability and Reports screens show profitability per menu and per institution and a summary of the last six months.

Help and training

Since most people who will use the panel work in the kitchen, the warehouse or the field, I paid particular attention to the help system. At the top of each tab there are short tips explaining what to do on that tab. The description panel contains the screen's purpose, the questions it answers, its terms and a list of the elements on the page; selecting an element from the list highlights it on the screen.

I prepared narrated, subtitled training videos divided into chapters for every screen. I produced them with my own tools, which record the screen in a headless browser and add Turkish narration through a text-to-speech service. I also added a TV mode for kitchen or office displays, in which the menu is hidden, text is enlarged and tabs rotate at set intervals.

Technical stack

• The panel consists of HTML, CSS and JavaScript files that are served directly without a build step.
• I do not use external fonts, scripts or CDNs, and the content security policy only allows the site's own resources.
• For security, content is written to the page only as text, and no content that would be interpreted as HTML is inserted.
• I took the panel shell from a shared template I use in several projects; it includes menu search, pinning frequently used screens, keyboard shortcuts, two themes and an inactivity lock.
• I chose chart colours by measuring them in both themes, and made a legend, tooltips and a table view mandatory for cases where colour alone is not enough.
• I wrote a test script that runs in headless Chrome; it visits every tab of every screen, menu actions, both themes and the mobile layout, and runs a WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility check.
• During publishing, static files are named with a content hash and pre-compressed, so the browser cache can safely be used for a long time.

Use cases

• Catering companies that provide daily meals to institutions, factories, schools or hospitals can use this panel.
• It suits quality teams that need to keep food safety records in order and be ready for audits.
• It helps sales and tender teams that want to calculate quote prices from recipe costs.
• It is useful for purchasing and warehouse teams that want to follow raw material purchases, stock and expiry dates together.

Status

The first phase, the showcase panel, is complete. The next phases will start after a presentation and feedback meeting with the company. The plan is a server and API setup in which data is kept on the server and real users and permissions are used, followed by integration with ERP and accounting software, and finally mobile applications for the warehouse and the field.