Dismissal Bot
This was a project done for a preschool. Their dismissal process was to have someone stand in the parking lot and read the hang tag numbers off of cars as they entered the parking lot. These would be written down on a piece of paper and periodically handed off to someone in the office. That person would use an Excel spreadsheet to translate the handwritten tag numbers into student and teacher names. The person in the office would call out the student and teacher names to "runners" who would escort the student out to their waiting parents.
The solution that I proposed and developed for them was a simple GroupMe bot. The bot was joined to a staff GroupMe channel and would respond to any announced tag numbers with the student and teacher names as well as the time that they were paged for dismissal. By using GroupMe, the accessibility of the solution was made very simple; there was no need to manage users other than the school's existing procedures for adding staff to internal GroupMe channels.
The solution was hosted on Google Cloud Platform using extremely minimal resources since it stored a very small amount of data and only needed to be accessible for a small amount of time each day. The resulting usage fell solidly within GCP's free tier and could be easily scaled to onboard new clients.
The solution was well-received by the preschool's management and teachers. There was much less confusion among the staff involved in dismissal and the IT overhead of the project was essentially nothing for everyone involved.