Interviews and Analysis

This week I worked on conducting interviews of the Market Place staff. I was able to talk to two different cashiers about their direct involvement in the process, and a Market Place supervisor as a means of getting a more general view of how the program is working as a whole. I was able to get some really valuable input from these interviews. I learned that the computer system that we use to check people out is perfectly capable of being programed so that the checking in/out of containers could somehow be attached to an individual's account. This would eliminate the need for tokens and would solve the problem of frequently losing them. All three staff members, however, said that the program seems to be running very smoothly and they don't have any complaints, aside from suggesting the use of id cards instead of tokens. Once I finished the interviews, I started working on analyzing all of the information that I have gathered, and creating a report to present to Campus Dining with possible suggestions and improvements. One idea that I have come up with is making more use of technology in the whole system. This would include putting an indication of your enrollment in the program on your account. The other big idea that I had was making use of a scanner to check containers in and back out, which would allow students to put their containers on the conveyor belt to be washed by the school, instead of having to wash it themselves, and would solve the problem of cleaning the containers before returning them. The scanner would be mounted on the wall next to the tray conveyor belt. Under this system, students would bring back a dirty container, scan it in, then place it on the conveyor belt. Then, the next time they want food to go, they go to a cashier, who would have a stack of clean containers. The cashier would scan the container out and then the student would go get food. There are definitely still kinks in this system because we would need the scanners to be able to either communicate with each other, or if we used id cards, be able to keep track of which containers are in and which ones are out. The other problem with this system is that we would need to have all of the containers printed with a barcode. Next week I will continue researching possible solutions and working on my report.