Inventory Management Project

Poster Image
Event poster; details follow in description
Poster Session
A
Poster Number
04
Project Author(s)
Mallory Hawke
Institution
Portland State University
Project Description

The Bonded Storage team at NASA’s Glenn Research Center (GRC) holds custodianship over a large inventory primarily consisting of expensive, bespoke, purpose-built flight and research hardware. These assets have served their original purpose and been retired but may continue to serve NASA, either in part or in whole, in future projects. However, until recently, there was no clear or coherent way for members of GRC to find, or request, pieces of this inventory. The Inventory Management Project (IMP) is a persistent, NASA-internal, web application, which seeks to resolve this tension by serving two primary functions; first, it provides the Bonded Storage team with an intuitive, easy-to-use, tool-suite which allows them to upload, maintain, and track their asset inventory. This tool suite consists of a database management tool, which supports create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations and provides basic .csv support, as well as an order management system that allows them to view, update, delete, or fulfill customer orders. Second, it serves as a catalog, enabling the various engineering teams and labs around GRC to easily search through this inventory to find and request assets, or their subcomponents, for use in current projects. IMP has been built exclusively using industry-standard languages, tools, and frameworks such as: NodeJS, Express JS, JavaScript, MySQL, and Passport; this ensures a high degree of application stability, as well as long-term maintainability. As of writing, the application is live on NASA’s servers and employs a SAML protocol for single sign-on.