Help with new Delivery shop – POS options and setup.

[Integraoligist]

I’m trying to get everything prepped and ready for my new location is will strictly be pickup & delivery.
Right now I’m working on my POS, and I’d like to know…

1. For the Prep Areas (2), are we better off using a Kitchen Monitor(s) or the standard Printed Tickets?
2. For the area where the pizzas come out of the conveyer ovens, are we better off to have a printed box label sticker or the just use the standard Printed Prep ticket and attach it to the boxes (which we have done without flaw using our Deck ovens)?

I’m concerned about speed (as in readability and making of the food), accuracy or the orders produced, and overall cost of the disposable products as compared to the electronics (cheaper to have paper & box stickers for the short-term but better off having PC screens that will not go to waste)

Thanks all for the help!

 

[Patriot_sPizza]

I use POS make-line monitor and a receipt printer @ the cut-table/driver…works well 4 me…

Paul uses a box printer & I reckon he’s quite happy as well…I think either way you go is fine…

 

[stebby1]

I used a kitchen monitor, and then a box label printer at the cut table. The labels printed as soon as the order was sent to the kitchen. The person cutting could see what was coming up, and they only put the labels on the items as they were coming up. I cant stand having a large stack of labeled boxes sitting around waiting to be filled. I never used prep tickets, they always were getting misplaced, and since we used thermal printers, if they got hot, they turned black.

I used a zebra lp 2844, and you could go into the printer settings and have the labels print rotated 180 degrees so that you could read them without the printer being turned around or standing on your head. I also used Point of Success Premium and had great success with it.

 

[famouspizza]

we use make line screens with bump bars for our cooking lines. When the order is made they are bumped and then print at the cut table. The screens save alot of time pushing paper although depending on your system you might have to get used to rushing orders, etc…

Labels vs paper is a personal preference. We were not used to labels so did not use the printers, although I hear alot of folks love them

PS If you are in the market for some label printers that are only a few days old PM me and I can send you the details

 

[pizzapirate]

I think about this from time to time but to me you can’t eliminate tickets anyway because eventually they have to be attached to orders for identification. Monitors work very well in fast food operations because the order is made at the register and then its made and immediately handed out. In the pizza biz people are calling in their orders so the food stacks up until customers pick it up or drivers deliver it.

Where I do think it makes sense for a pizza operation is at the front for the counter people. When someone comes in they can quickly glance at the monitor to see what the “whole” order is and get it together. The POS obviously shows this too but its tough to tie up a machine while this is done. A separate monitor would just make it easier to hand food out.

Labels printers? Sounds like a great idea but simple tape is probably quicker than trying to peel off labels (assumption here). Labels are obviously more expensive than paper and I worry about the waste. To me, and I haven’t actually worked with labels, the only advantage is they probably stick better but big deal. Just my point of view . . .

 

[famouspizza]

pizzapirate:

I think about this from time to time but to me you can’t eliminate tickets anyway because eventually they have to be attached to orders for identification. Monitors work very well in fast food operations because the order is made at the register and then its made and immediately handed out. In the pizza biz people are calling in their orders so the food stacks up until customers pick it up or drivers deliver it.
stick better but big deal. Just my point of view . . .

You are not eliminating tickets you are replacing them with the labels…all the info on a ticket is on the label. Would work best in higher volume shops especially when the cut table is separate from the make line. Removes the tedious step of moving the ticket for every order and labels are printed for every item in the order it was made. My POS also includes a summary on the bottom (1 of 4, etc. and a summary 2 Pizzas, 1 Wings, 1 Salad, 1 Soda) which cuts down on mistakes.\

Screens definitely make us more efficient.

 

[Piper]

Integraoligist:

1. For the Prep Areas (2), are we better off using a Kitchen Monitor(s) or the standard Printed Tickets?

I use tickets in both of my stores, but I would love to have monitors. My ideal setup would be one monitor at the pantry, one at the make-line and one at the cut table. The ticket/label would print after being bumped from the cut table. My full-service restaurant would also need one at the sautee station. Pantry and sautee would bump to the expo printer since 95% of that stuff is dine-in.

I would have three advantages:

1. Avoiding our cashiers and drivers coming back constantly to check if orders are ready. They get in the way and stress the oven guys. It would be great for them to be able to get the status on their monitor and know if it was being made, in the oven, or done.
2. More efficient dispatching. Drivers would have a better understanding of what orders are ready and almost ready and could better identify doubles or triples.
3. And of course, tickets can sometimes go missing and cause major problems when the customer shows up and we haven’t started their order yet. Doesn’t happen often to us, but it’s a terrible error.

There are three negatives for me switching over:

1. You can’t write on a kitchen monitor, and we have to do some writing on our tickets to identify pizzas by pan numbers. We do a stuffed pizza and you can’t see what’s in it, so the cook writes the pan number on the ticket and that’s how the cut table guy identifies it later.
2. Cost. I’d have to buy a computer, bump bar and POS license for each kitchen monitor.
3. Laziness. I’d have to run a whole bunch of additional cabling in already built restaurants. Being obsessive/compulsive I can’t cope with being able to see cabling anywhere so I’d have a lot of wall fishing to do.

If I was building another place from scratch and had it in the budget, I’d be going with kitchen monitors and finding a way to solve problem #1 above.

I’ve never used box labels, but I would if we were bigger on delivery and carry-out. We do mostly dine-in so most of our tickets spend a max of 30 seconds at the pass and then get thrown out. Labels would be a waste of money for me. Unless POS could bump to-go orders to a label printer and dine-in orders to a receipt printer? Hmm… now I’ll be up for another hour thinking about the possibilities!

 

[Integraoligist]

For POS I’m currently using Point-of-Success at my current shop and plan on using again at this new shop.

I like the idea of using the monitors on the prep areas so tickets do not get lost and if something happens with the printer, the order does not get printed…

As I have never used a kitchen monitor before, is it possible to setup the system as Piper said, as in once the order is finished being made you touch the kitchen monitor to knock it off the screen then it will auto-print to a receipt printer at the end of the conveyer?

After thinking about the item’s that we will be serving other then pizza (sandwiches, wings, appetizers) I don’t see how it is feasible to use Box Labels. When many of your items don’t actually go into a box but rather a bag… then we wouldn’t be able to use the Box Label anyway, I’d have to get a regular receipt printer regardless, correct?

Also, what exactly is a “bump bar� I’m guessing is a mechanism to connect to the POS so when the person is finished making the order they tap this Bar and it boots the order off the screen? And if so, why would you need it, why not just touch the order on the screen (if it works like that)?

Thanks all!

 

[Wizzle_Wassell]

I think if you are doing any serious volume then a makeline monitor is the way to go. I can’t imagine a 100+ pie hour with tickets moving around the shop.

We work on the basis of makeline monitor, the order is knocked off when it goes in and a sticker is produced. If its a pie order then its one sticker per box with the additional non-pizza items on the first box. If its additional non-pizza orders then it produces a sticker with a list of the items only.

Stickers are great IMO, they don’t fall off, get moved, torn, or blow away. If you need a ‘ticket’ rather than a sticker (for, say, dine in) then just leave the back on.

 

[stebby1]

With Point of Success, you have 2 options regarding makeline monitors and printing labels (unless they added others I havent seen). The first, which I use, is the labels print as soon as the order is placed and submitted to the kitchen. The order also shows up on the kitchen monitor at this time. The second option is that you can click once on the order on the monitor, and click Print-Box Labels, and then double click the order to remove the order from the screen. I prefer the first method as we had a tendency to skip around on orders and be working on multiple orders at the same time, and I like as few as clicks as possible. The last I checked, you cant remove individial items from the kitchen monitor, only whole orders.

As for items in bags, You can place the labels on the bags themselves. I have even seen colored labels that you can get that might stand out better on your items. For 2-liters, we always put those labels on one of the pizza boxes, and the delivery drivers just took a quick glance at the box to see they needed other items. If you have all your items set up to use a single box label location, the ones handling the orders can look at the labels to see if they’re missing anything by looking in the corner at the label numbers (1 of 5, 2 of 5, etc). If you use 2 label printers, label counts restart with each printer, so thats something to keep in mind.

A bump bar is a piece of hardware that has a bunch of numbered buttons on it. You would push the button corresponding to the order location number on the kitchen monitor to bump it. You’ve probably seen these in places like taco bell, long john silvers, burger king. They’re usually mounted on the wall, approx 12 inches wide and 3 inches tall. I’ve always used a mouse and just double clicked the orders to remove them from the screen, havent seen the point in spending the money on a bump bar.