Online Ordering System

1. Introduction

Computers have definitely became part of the life and made it much easier for accessing almost any kind of information. Life is full of technological improvement and in this technological generation it is very difficult for any organization to survive without utilizing technology. The World Wide Web contributes greatly to the creation of an ever-increasing global information database. It could also be used as a mechanism to share information within an enterprise. Food served in food zone and Cafeterias is offered from a limited menu, cooked in bulk and in advance and kept hot. The students spend an average of +- 30 minutes per day going to the food zone or Cafeteria, long queuing, selecting their meals, paying and waiting for their meals. CUT Food zone do not give students that provision to order meals in advance and to be ready for them to pick or to be delivered to them.

The purpose of this project is to develop a full complete system for an online ordering for Central University of Technology food zone service which will free up the service to speed up and be easily manageable for an online menu which student can browse and use to place orders with just a few clicks. The students will have the opportunity to choose whether they want the food to be brought to them or it will be packaged for pick up and the payment method will be upon delivery or pick up. For the administration there will be a system administrator who will manipulate the system (have the right to add and manage user accounts), a manager who will be managing product and orders and a food parcel deliverer who will be dealing specifically with deliveries and pending deliveries. The student will be in a position to register, go through the products and place an order. After all there will be a confirmation receipt for each and every order made by the student which can be printed.

The development of this system will be based on variety of languages, HTML as the programming languages and the database system will have MySQL server. Hypertext mark-up Language (HTML) language is favourable due to its ease of learn and use validation properties while MySQL has better advanced features and properties, has good security, is open source and has cross platform operability

2. Problem Statement

Every student has a right foundation to stay concentrated and participate during lecture class. This can be achieved only if students can be given enough time during lunch period to eat proper relaxed and let food digest well before going back to classes. The most major challenge that the students of Central University of Technology encounter is the short duration of lunch time (break) which is from 12:25 to 13:05pm. This came to a realization and serious attention that during lunch time students must go to food zone (cafeteria) to buy meals and that is very time consuming because only