HOPS is a recruitment agency specialising in agricultural seasonal workers, annually placing approximately 10,000 recruits on British farms for crop picking and processing.
Key personnel at HOPS rely on daily management reports to monitor daily operations, particularly as much of their work occurs off-site. To meet this need, they requested automated nightly generation and distribution of these reports to designated staff members via email.
The reports are generated by extracting data from the HOPS MS SQL database, processing it using PHP, and formatting the information into Excel spreadsheets using PHPExcel. These files are then emailed to a predefined distribution list.
The entire process is orchestrated by a Linux cron job for efficiency and reliability.