RMV Stainless Steel Fabrication

01 / Context

The problem to solve.

Appointments, quotations, project updates, payments, and fabrication records can become fragmented when customers, staff, and administrators rely on separate manual processes.

02 / Approach

From need to interface.

The capstone connects those steps in one role-based system, giving each account type the screens and actions needed for its part of the appointment-to-fabrication workflow.

What I built

• Responsive role-based dashboards
• Appointment and project workflows
• Payments, reports, and document handling
• Fabrication progress and notifications

03 / Implementation

How it fits together.

A React and TypeScript frontend consumes an Express REST API backed by MongoDB. Firebase supports authentication-related services, while Socket.IO, document handling, and PayMongo integrations support live updates, files, and payments. Docker, Nginx, and blue-green deployment scripts support the hosted environment.

Decisions that shaped the build

• Used role-specific dashboards instead of exposing one shared administrative interface
• Centralized workflow rules and validation in backend services
• Added state-machine, authorization, validation, and service tests around high-risk transitions

Challenges

• Modeling status transitions across appointments, projects, fabrication, and delivery
• Keeping customer, staff, and administrator access rules consistent
• Coordinating payment, file, notification, and real-time workflows

04 / Delivery & lessons

Built, tested, and still learning.

Testing

Frontend Vitest tests cover authentication routing, project access, report and engineer workflows, configuration safety, and contrast regressions. Backend Vitest suites cover authentication policies, validation, state transitions, payments, refunds, fabrication, and other services; smoke-test scripts exercise API and pipeline flows. Run `npm run test` in each repository and the documented smoke commands when test data is available. Full browser coverage and live-provider sandbox checks remain areas for further testing.

Deployment

The React frontend and Express API are deployed with Docker/Nginx operations documented in the repositories; a public demo is available.

What I took forward

• Business workflows need explicit state and permission rules before UI implementation
• Service-level validation is essential when several roles can affect one project
• Deployment and rollback procedures should be treated as part of the application