KDS Production Item Count Lag

[JoeD]

I just switched our restaurant to KDS screens in our quick service restaurant and was so excited about production item counts and how they could create massive efficiencies for our kitchen. Unfortunately we cannot rely on production item counts to update or be correct on a regular basis. Our workflow is all tickets come in from the register HELD by utilizing course pacing. All orders are then selected by the Expediter KDS  and fired at once (busy times this can mean 10 tickets being fired while 10 tickets are held). We have the setting for only counting fired tickets vs fired and held tickets.

It seems to be a batching issue or a hardware issue where the information on production item counts does not update in a timely manner or updates incorrectly. With an unlimited time frame I think the production items. I find that the most laggy production item counts are the ones which are attributed to the most items. For example, a beef patty is associated with every burger on our menu, 2 beef patties for doubles, 3 for tripples etc. This count is almost always wrong during a busy rush. 

I think our networking is pretty solid... all hardware besides handhelds are hard wired on ethernet with fixed IPs. But open to questions/solutions regarding this aspect of things

I've tried placing all KDS terminals in grid view and limiting the amount of closed orders stored to the minimum. I've also shrunk the time for showing tickets on the "recently fulfilled" option to 20 minutes which I think is our safest bare minimum time to restore tickets that have been mistakenly fulfilled.

There have been some errors due to configuration but I am familiar enough with our setup to identify these issues and resolve them (i.e. item overides the prep station or doesnt have all appropriate production item counts). These errors are easy to identify because they always occur when the same. In other cases, I am sure the direct configuration is not the issue but a lag of some sort. The count EVENTUALLY reaches the correct state but when its 3-15 minutes later this is too late to be of any use.

We are still seeing many errors on an hourly basis which is pushing us towards abandoning the feature all together. What good is a count you cant trust? 

Has anyone experienced this issue? Any potential solutions? 

Thanks,
Joe

[JoeD]

Doubles. Triples, etc are their own items. Have been constantly resyncing and rebooting as any changes are made when I'm troubleshooting outside of service. On top of that we are rebooting and clearing the cache on a daily basis. I appreciate the suggestions! Still seeing lag after upgrading our network switch and optimizing back end networking settings. Do you know how I would go about learning more about how the kds works/stores/fetches data so I can potentially optimize my settings around this? 

[rcmck]

Just curious, are you on a toast managed network or self managed? I think https://doc.toasttab.com/ is the best place to learn anything, though there isn't much on production counts. 

[JoeD]

Self managed (and on enterprise level comcast plan). The owner is pretty well versed in all of this stuff and has been eager to learn more/help if we can uncover any networking anomalies.

[rcmck]

Ok, it you can next chance you get, look under device status, and see if under sync hub device details that they are connected to the sync hub device. I assume you reviewed the network requirements? The toast network is on its own vlan etc. https://central.toasttab.com/s/article/Toast-Network-Requirements-Overview?language=en_US 

[JoeD]

I forgot to look at the sync hub status of each 1 by 1 today but on every one I have seen when checking device status for other things they are on the same one. Quick question though on the testing you did to try to emulate my problem. Were your kds devices with production item counts using grid view or legacy view?  Also are you able to get held tickets to not be counted on all day view when using grid view? For me, grid view + all day view counts fired and held tickets but outside of all day view, the production item counts are only counting fired tickets and ignoring held tickets. This setting becomes available when you show held tickets on all prep stations via the meal pacing settings in Toast Web.