Item Routing

[Sdaniel]

Hi everyone!

Looking for a bit of guidance with item routing. We have a special menu group called Limited Time Beverages, which is used for both dine-in and online orders. When someone orders a drink from this group, it prints correctly at the drinks prep station for both online orders and dine in orders. The problem is with online orders, the kitchen printer, which is linked to the food prep station, doesn’t get the drinks, just the food. So, drinks don’t show up on the kitchen ticket for online orders. Which makes sense since the kitchen printer is assigned to the food prep station only. 

This is the only beverage menu that's used for both online orders and dine-in. For all other drinks have separate menus for dine in and online orders. For online orders, both the food and drinks prep stations are assigned to the menu group, so drinks show up on the kitchen printer ticket. I'd like to avoid making two different versions of the limited-time beverage menu, if possible. 

What we need:

For online orders, drinks from the Limited Time Beverages group should print on the kitchen ticket.

For dine-in orders, drinks should not print on the kitchen ticket just at the drinks station, like they do now.

I've been working with the "Item Routing" settings but haven't been able to fully figure out a way to make this work. This seems to only be an issue at locations that still use printed kitchen tickets. At locations that rely solely on KDS and no longer print tickets, this is not an issue.

Thanks all! 🙂

[Sdaniel]

Hey Rob!

Thank you for sharing this! I did some testing and part of what I am looking for works... the problem I am having now is that dine in food that was assigned to the Food prep station now routes to our barista prep station. I looked through the article and am having trouble figuring out what I am doing incorrectly in the setup. 

[rcmck]

Can you share some screenshots of prep stations and item routing that you tried? 

[Sdaniel]

Of course! 

Here is the Limited Time Beverage Menu Group: Both Food and Barista Prep Stations are assigned.

Using this location as an example, but here are the printers assigned to the food and Barista prep stations:

Item Routing: I had set more rules but archived them as the rules were not working. The problem is that with this rule, items from the food prep station will not appear on the Barista Prep Station KDS, but not at the Food Prep station KDS. 

I am sure there's something I am doing incorrectly; any guidance is appreciated. 🙂

[rcmck · Accepted solution]

Thanks, I may be missing something but why is the LTO Beverage menu routed to food and barista by default? Or is that just your current workaround at the moment? You just want it to go to food when it is takeout right?

As far as the item routing example you shared, it looks like it is sending food to barista because basically that is what it is being told to do, anything that is dine in is reouted from master_food to master_barista.

Again, maybe I missed something but I would think that you would want your LTO Group to just route to  master_barista, then reroute it if it is takeout from master_barista to TG_Food and TG_Barista

Something like this, (not sure if it still need to also go to master_barista too but you would just select that as well, if that's the case)

You would add these for however many takeout/delivery dining options you have that it would apply to, obviously you would give them more meaningful names than what I wrote to keep track of them. 

[Sdaniel]

Hi!

Originally, the LTO Beverage Menu was only routed to the Barista station. However, for testing purposes, I also assigned it to the Food Prep station, following Rob’s instruction:

Ensure that both the drinks and food prep stations are assigned to the 'limited-time beverages' menu group for online orders. This will allow drinks to appear on the kitchen printer ticket for online orders.

On our Third-Party menu, both Food Prep and Barista are assigned to the LTO Beverage menu group, and everything functions as expected. However, for Online Ordering and Dine-In, we use a shared LTO Beverage menu. This results in LTO beverages appearing correctly at the Barista prep station and on the Carryout KDS but not printing on the same ticket as the food since the menu isn’t also assigned to the Food Prep station.

The diagram you shared seems to make sense. I will give that a try. Thank you!