The Domino’s Pizza Plugin

This last year, Squidwork’s Geek,  Shannon Anderson,  a Sr. Systems Engineer; software developer and RMM platform Integrator spent several days at the LabTech Synergy boot camp where he was immersed in the operations of the LabTech platform as part of an integration overview. The idea, LabTech wanted Integrators to come away with at this boot camp, was Integration can come in all forms. With Integration we can have a great impact on the business we support.

This was never more apparent then when during day two of the boot camp they had a pizza luncheon with the Sr. Development team from LabTech and the attendees at the Synergy boot camp. The organizers had miscalculated the amount of pizza a room of technical engineers would consume and so they found themselves a little short on substance.

Innovation can come from some of the oddest places and for the most bizarre reasons. Not having enough pizza to go around a room of engineers started discussions about how innovations could solve problems like this. The room of engineers threw out different ideas that reached across the spectrum of possibilities, even for pizza. It then came down to “There should be a Domino’s Pizza Plugin for LabTech” , not just a web page on a tab but a more analytical approach to pizza delivery.

The question arose, how can a RMM platform make a better “mouse trap”, or, in this instance a better pizza delivery service? You could look across the room and see the “gear heads” toiling with the idea as they started spewing out different features this plugin would need. It had to be automated; it had to be simple;  it needed to calculate and understand how much pizza would be needed; and it should follow up with management to provide some layers for determining progress of the pizza to be delivered.

The Domino’s Pizza Plugin was born. This plugin would use the RMM platform to calculate how many people at a client’s company were actively logged in to PC’s to determine the gross pizza that was needed to be ordered. It would then send out a notice to each workstation requesting feedback as to the toppings and then take that feedback to determine how to slice up the orders so that everyone got the toppings on the amount of pizza they were to consume. It would then need to order the correct amount and to pay for it via the corporate credit card. It should calculate the distance the driver would drive to cover the tip as well. There would need to be a scheduler that could be used so that if the company opted into a “Pizza Friday” this could be scheduled automatically. There would need to be a manual launcher provided that would allow “one off” orders for these special occasions that prompted for a pizza lunch and the ability to add offline users to the order. We had to take in mind, that a company is not always at the same location. The plugin would need to determine all company locations and the amount of active employees at each location to carve up the order so that each location received the allotted amount pizza. Of course, we would need some metrics sent back to the management team like costs per order; number of orders per month and year; the most popular toppings ordered; and how much each employee consumes regularly. The plugin should show how its ROI is doing and the amount of man hours it has saved the company by automating all the duties of coordinating a mass pizza order for the company. Now we could see the untold hours each year it would save a company who otherwise would have to take on such costly tasks, and of course, all the happy employees with full bellies.

What is seen by this demonstration in engineering prowess is that Innovation can be found in the most absurd places, they can also have the most impact.   The next time your company orders pizza ask if there is an APP for that.

Shannon Anderson

a.k.a Cubert