Best form of research for this project is get on the phone to some pizza places and start ordering pizzas ;o) Listen to the questions they ask you as they're taking your order and make note.
Basic information usually includes things like:
- Customer information - address, phone number etc, special information such as directions
- Time order was placed - including date and time.
- Requested delivery time (for advance orders) to allow for scheduling.
- Time order was sent for delivery so they can report on late orders.
- Order items including manufacturer cost, quantity ordered and retail price to allow order totalling and simple profit/loss reporting.
Maybe have a field for complaints/comments that shows up on the user's profile when they call in. So if their last order was wrong when it showed up, it shows up prominently on their profile when you pull it up.
If a customer complains, usually the pizza place will comp a portion of their order next time around, so maybe have a section on their profile for concessions like this.
Every pizza place is different as far as their operating policies go though, so the best way is going to be to get on the horn to them and do some digging. I have no clue, I've never worked in a pizza place...but I've ordered a LOT of them.
Best real world advice from a commercial software engineer:
If you're designing a piece of software to do something useful in industry, go and ask the people who would be using it. In this case, get down to a few of your local pizza places and when you're placing your order, ask if you can bother the manager for a few minutes. Tell them you're writing a piece of software for a school project for Pizza Delivery Management and ask them if they'd mind running you through their current order system and
ask their advice and opinion on what they think would make their lives easier and make their ordering process simpler and more accurate.
This will be 100 times more useful than trawling the net looking for bits of software that already do this because I guarantee you, most of the software on the net will either fall so far short of useful or will have so many features that it doesn't make the shop's life easier at all because the users are so overwhelmed they can't remember where all the bits are.
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