Online certification of food products

Abstract

The increasing demands for quality food products have created a new dimension around the globe. Obtaining quality certification is a crucial concern to product manufacturers for marketing their food products in the local as well as in the international market. Currently in Bangladesh, there is scope of achieving quality certificates through a semi-automated system. The current process of obtaining quality certificates is time consuming and so manufacturers face difficulty in obtaining the certificates. Since Bangladesh is trying to export more food products, the need is increasing for quality certificates in due time. An automated system where the product manufacturers apply online and the authorities update the survey results online can facilitate the certificate obtaining and the corresponding renewal processes. This project develops a web based online system for management of food certificates. The key features of the developed software are the user application for a new quality certification and also renewal of previous certificates. Moreover, the developed system has aspects such as data monitoring by the applicants and the authority, and generating and updating survey forms by the inspection team. Once the evaluation process ends, the successful applicants can download the certificates. Besides, the software has an admin user role which can control and monitor the overall system, set access permission and generate required reports. The overall software was developed using the popular Waterfall process model. The system was implemented using WampServer 3.0.6 as a Windows web development environment, PHP-5.6.25 as a scripting language for server-side web development, MySQL-5.7.14 as open source relational database server and Macromedia Dreamweaver 8.0 as HTML editor tool for user interface design. In addition, Crystal Report was used for generating printable reports. Unit testing and system testing were performed before the software was finalized. The developed software successfully met the initial requirements. As future work, this developed system can be extended to include full online fees payment.