Programmathon 2022
July 2022
Despite a two-year hiatus, the Programmathon was back in full force on July 21st. As the name suggests, the Programmathon is a gathering of computer programmers from all facets of the Labatt San Antonio office—Sales, Marketing, Purchasing, Routing, and Operations—with a discernibly competitive bent. The participants are tasked with developing a project idea along with a supportive platform that will benefit the systems at Labatt. This year there were 20 programmers participating in the event. Broken into five teams of four, these groups worked all day in the back dining room of Hearthstone Bakery, turning the area into a beehive of brainstorming, coding, designing, and occasional snacking. (Chef Jason Vanderburg and his team at Hearthstone provided food throughout the day.) From 7:00am to 5:00pm it was time for “heads down coding,” to quote the Director of IT, Isaac Gremmer. At the end of the day, the five teams presented their work to a panel of five judges, which included Blair Labatt, David Pope, Cara Vives, Tony Canty, and Annie Labatt. Isaac, who coordinated the event, acted as Master of Ceremonies during the presentations.
In one pressure-cooker of a day, the teams addressed considerations meant to greatly improve communication and efficiencies within the company. These presentations also stimulated further conversations about future projects and programming opportunities. Topics addressed and approached included a better way of sharing queries and data drawn from the AS400, a means of studying trends for customer profitability more efficiently, a project that would allow the user to see the status of a particular item much more easily, a mobile PRM (Prospect Relationship Manager) for sales reps, and a dashboard that would allow freight coordinators to track POs more efficiently and would integrate the concerns of freight coordinators into the systems used by sales and purchasing.
This final topic, the Freight Dashboard, was tackled by the team given the Judges Pick Award. This team included Juan Arreola, Abe Estenson, Reagan Lasswell, and Nathan Shirlberg.
The Developers Pick Award was given to the group that developed the mobile PRM application. Christina Basha, Drew Cowan, Joel Garcia, and Kabryn Hodgson were in this team.
The hard work of the Programmathon was not limited to that one day. With Liz Chambers at the helm, the Customer Profitability project, a much needed tool, will soon be underway. The PRM application is going to be demoed at the sales meeting on Friday the 19th. Both the new web-based Item Stat application and the Freight Dashboard are already live and currently being used. New features and improvements are already in the works for the mobile PRM application, the Item Stat program, and the Freight Dashboard.
The event was a huge success and a true testament to the brainpower of our programmer colleagues. We can all look forward to seeing improvements generated by the programs developed and inspired during the Programmathon event in the near future.
