This is more of an opinion poll, but when a driver has 3 or 5 orders, do you the owner or the phone order taker decide which order they should be delivered in or does the driver do it in the order that he sees fit? What policy seems to work best?
Do folks send out 3 to 5 orders at a time?..1 to 3 might be okay but 4 or 5 seems to be pushing it as far as getting a quality product at the other end…
When I was a driver most often I started closest and worked my way out…Sometimes depending on what was in the order I may switched some…Baked pastas could hold longer than pizza so if the closest delivery was pasta I may go to the more distant location 1st…
Thanks royster. 
So it sounds like they left it up to you to decide how to do it. Your system seems to make sense. Did time stamps of the order matter that much, or was it more about total time efficiency?
On most nights there were 3 or 4 drivers and lots of orders…So most of the time the orders were within minutes of each other…On slow nights they just sent out orders 1 or 2 at a time so there was no delay…They did not hold 1 order waiting for another to pair with a delivery run…
One of the local places that will deliver to me is about 20 minutes away…But most nights it is pretty much an hour to me because they hold orders waiting for more to go on the same run…I think that hurts them more than helps them…
First Come, First Served. If something that is near to the first order that is up AND it is either out of the oven or will be out in the next 30 seconds driver will take it as a double. Otherwise it is a single.
Goal is to have drivers back in the store every 20 minutes or less to keep fresh pizza’s moving out of the store. Even if this means we start racking pizza’s before cooking them to make sure they are coming out of the ovens when the drivers should be back.
Anything more then a triple is a rare occurrence. Now if we have 3 or 4 deliveries within a block then i will consider it. But even then i would rather two drivers take doubles each and both be back in 15 minutes.
Over the course of a shift, we have found an average of 1.4 to 1.6 deliveries per run gets the best service and quality. Which also leads to better tips and more orders in the long run.
Thanks phoenix, that makes a lot of sense. You have this down to a science.
I think it hurts the driver too like phoenix was saying. I guess it really comes down to, the hotter and faster the food is, the better the tips.
We use Prism and it not only time stamps our orders but assigns a sector to them. It’s really a no brainier which deliveries go first, it’s the order in which they come in.