Operations Platform

Context

Computers For Schools Manitoba takes in donated computers, refurbishes them, and gets them into schools and community organizations. When I started in 2020, all of that ran through an old Microsoft Access database that could hardly be updated anymore.

This was my first real project. I started with a plain PHP app to replace it, but after learning so much about application security I had realized I need a proper framework, which gave me my first taste of Laravel. The Executive Director saw what it could do, and it grew into a full Laravel app used across every Manitoba location.

DatabaseWEB home dashboard with weekly cataloguing and production counts — The home dashboard in the test environment. Weekly counts for cataloguing, pre-production, and orders, with a leaderboard so staff could see how their week compared.

Problem

Ten operational areas, each with its own workflow and its own people.

Donation intake and donor records
Asset tracking for donated equipment, with custom material attributes and subtypes
Stock transfers between locations, with a full history for chain of custody
Client records, orders, tax and payment handling, and order assignment
RMAs and returns
Received shipments and recycling loads, with regulatory reporting

The people doing the work needed to see just their part. Leadership needed reporting across all of it.

Approach

Laravel 8
MySQL
Blade
mPDF

Built with the people using it. I got requirements straight from the Executive Director and the warehouse, refurb, and admin staff. Each department's workflow was modelled with the people who actually did that work, and then I kept adjusting as they used it.

Asset tracking. Every piece of donated equipment has custom attributes and subtypes. Stock transfers and a full audit trail give a chain of custody for each item.

Cataloguing a material from a donation load — Cataloguing one item out of a donation load. Storage devices get attached to the material so they can be tracked and wiped separately.

Material lookup with a computer's details open — Material lookup. Each item has its own record with specs, storage, pre-production status, history, and its current location.

Orders. Client records, tax and payments, order assignment, file attachments, CSV bulk import, and PDF invoices with mPDF.

Viewing an order with its product counts and print options — An order in production. Product counts on the left, the products themselves on the right, and one-click printing for labels, contents, and the order sheet.

Access. A role and permission layer I wrote from scratch, so admins, supervisors, and floor staff each only see the modules that matter to them.

RMAs and recycling. Returns go through their own RMA flow. Received shipments get logged as a whole, then broken down item by item, so one shipment of recycled equipment can have hundreds of entries and still trace back to where it came from.

New RMA form — Opening an RMA. The material, the reported problem, who brought it in, whether data needs recovering, and a checklist of what came with it.

Reporting and feedback. Quarterly and annual dashboards, plus an in-app issue reporter so staff could flag problems without leaving the system.

Hosting. It ran on a Windows Server on site. I wrote batch scripts to back up MySQL every day and pull new versions whenever I pushed them.

Scale

The last time I had to dig into the backend, this is roughly what it was holding.


Inventory records	100,000+
Orders, RMAs, and received shipments	Thousands
Recycled equipment entries per shipment	Hundreds
Database tables	46
Controllers	41
Views	100+
Operational areas	10
Commits	471

Outcome

It became the system the organization runs on for donations, inventory, warehousing, orders, returns, and recycling, and it passed 100,000 records while I was there. After I moved to my next job I kept supporting it on contract until August 2024, shipping new reports and dashboard tweaks whenever they needed them. It's still what they run on today.