Cloud-based End-to-End System Helped Feed Ontario Achieve ~60% Operational Optimization

Feed Ontario is a Canadian NGO that works to end poverty and hunger by uniting local communities, food banks, and industry partners. The NGO focuses on ensuring new and safe food supplies and promoting change through policy analysis and creative programming.

Initially, the NGO used to manually manage the donor creation process that was time-intensive. Only the company’s administration had the access to the process. Moreover, the user’s system showed inefficiencies, providing inaccurate reporting data on the food banks and donors. The systems also involved data integrity issues, which resulted in hours for running reports and processing donations.

Feed Ontario partnered with Blazeclan to help them enhance the efficiency and speed of their system. Blazeclan provided the company with an end-to-end, automated donor creation system along with the migration of the transaction and master data to AWS cloud.

The Challenge

Feed Ontario’s existing system was based on a monolithic architecture, which was not scalable and faced performance issues. They were looking to enhance the speed and efficiency of their system for unbiased and seamless allocations of donation request to the food banks. While doing so, it was necessary that the supply and demand proportion remained balanced. Feed Ontario partnered with Blazeclan to resolve challenges that included

• Slow operations and inefficiency through the donation process.
• Inaccurate data reports of the users and processes.
• Exhaustive and time-intensive process of user creation.
• Integrity issue and incorrect data delivery while creating reports.

The Solution

Blazeclan proposed a solution that would build a cloud-native end-to-end system for Feed Ontario. This process was created by data experts at Blazeclan, who began by breaking down all existing features of the NGO’s existing system.

The Approach

• Built a web-based database for an unbiased, seamless, and effective addressing of food donation requests/orders.
• The reporting layer was based on the historical data with the help of PostgreSQL to facilitate the admin to make better, informed decisions. The existing database before was based on MySQL and it was migrated to PostgreSQL. The existing data was mapped to the new schema.
• The existing system of Feed Ontario was enhanced by resolving issues associated with the billing and allocation processes.
• Email templates were built for achieving end-to-end communication between users.
• The food delivery process of Feed Ontario was streamlined by identifying priority workloads. These were then categorized in sprints and tagged with appropriate user stories, tasks, or subtasks.

The cloud-native end-to-end system enabled Feed Ontario to assign and address the food donation requests efficiently along with an effective track record. Over a million donation requests/offers were migrated to the cloud-native system.

Architecture Diagram

Benefits Achieved by Feed Ontario

• The new system facilitated Feed Ontario in better decision-making. A seamless and transparent process was realized by them for the allocation of donation requests.
• The sprint-based approach enabled the NGO to maintain track of the overall functionalities and work features of the new system.
• The whole process of the users system was made seamless, which resulted in faster creation and operation of new donations.
• Feed Ontario achieved enhanced reporting that delivered the admin with the right and accurate data for providing donations to food banks efficiently. It also helped them in maintaining a perfect balance between demand and supply of food vis-a-vis donation requests.

“Working with Blazeclan on the development of our new system was a great experience. Their team was responsive to our requests and worked efficiently and effectively to meet our needs. The launch of this system will allow us to streamline our process, saving up to 15 working hours per week. It will assist us in better serving our network of food banks with fast communication and equitable allocation, as well as our donors with improved reporting capabilities. We are so grateful for their work and commitment to this project.”

Adelaide Wimpenny, Manager, Operations and Programs, Feed Ontario

Tech Stack