Does anyone else struggle with Managing online orders on the KDS system? I have a big feature request that I think most KDS customers would love. Let me know your thoughts.
We are a fast-casual concept, and one of our issues is prioritizing orders. Delivery orders get in the KDS system 30-45 mins before the driver arrives. Whereas, when we get a dine-in order, we would love it if it jumped the queue to the front of the KDS, so those customers are not waiting for 10 delivery orders to be prepared and sit on a shelf while the hungry customer waits at a table. Ideally, we would love to set a "completion time or promise time" to be able to be set by a combination of a value set at the dining option level and an item count option that can add to the promised time(PT).
So here is an example:
Dining Option | Standard Promise time
- 3rd Party Delivery 30min
- Native Delivery 25min
- Native Pickup 15min
- Dine-In 10min
- Take-out 8min
The second part would be choosing between Item count or Price
- Item count is > 10 add 15 mins
- Price is> $100
So orders would come in like this:
Order platform | Order Size| Order Time | Promise Time
- Native Delivery | 3 items | 12:59pm | 1:24pm
- Doordash | 1 item | 1:00pm | 1:30pm
- Native Pickup | 11 items | 1:07pm | 1:37pm (15mins for Native Pickup + 15 mins for Large order)
- Take-Out | 1 item | 1:15pm | 1:23 pm
- Dine-In | 1 item | 1:16pm | 1:26 pm
Currently, in this simplified example these would show up exactly how they are written above. What I would like is if they were ordered by that determined Promise Time so as the orders come in, they are re-sorted on the screen. 4,1,5,2,3 would end up being the order that they should be prepared based on those items still being on the screen
It would also be super helpful to have the timer count down to the promised time, so the tickets on the KDS turn yellow at 7 mins and red at 4 mins based on the warning settings.
We have been looking at many different ways to change our prep times, but with various channels having different timing requirements, it is difficult to accomplish. It also makes it hard because if we hold the Delivery orders by changing the prep time to something like 15 mins, it takes away the ability for the team to prepare those delivery orders a little earlier when there are less orders on the screen. We have tried to solve the issue with multiple 2 KDS screens for each station, one with dine-in and takeout and the other with Deliver, but it still tends to be hard for the teams to figure out which screen to prioritize at any given point. If set up correctly, I think this promise time feature is something every concept that does a mix between online ordering and dine-in/takeout on their KDS would benefit from. We would also be able to minimze our tech footprint and could add the larger KDS screens as opposed to 2 smaller one.
I would love to hear thoughts below from others in the community and hopefully this is a feature that we could see in the future.
