Order Throttling

[December]

Microworks has offered something for a few years called order throttling it helps with spreading out orders to not overwhelm the kitchen. I guess you can set a certain amount of orders per 15min block, or assign a numerical value to each menu item based on difficulty/time to make, if you go past your threshold the customer is told to pick up during the next available time block.
I kind of wish they just based it on a dollar amount per 15 min block as that would be the easiest for me to apply.

Im pretty sure all the POS companies have something similar.

Does anyone use it?

It seems like it would be a double edge sword and the juice wouldn’t be worth the squeeze am I wrong?

 

[jackaloooooo]

We’ve only done it a few times. If we get around 100 in the queue we usually have enough staff to get caught up. One thing we’ll do is stop showing deliveries periodically for a while so we don’t have a lobby full of angry customers. We quote 30 -40 on pick up and an hour to an hour and 15 minutes on delivery. A couple of times we’ve had to stop taking orders - turn off online orders- and 1 person answers the phone to tell people to call back in half an hour.

 

[famousperry]

Foodtec offers automated promise times based on an algorithm of sorts (employees clocked in, items in bump queue, current OTD times, etc). Unfortunately, I have not been able to use it since the times that are quoted are too long. I know of some FT users that do use it I just don’t know how to get mine to operate more accurately. This would be huge since it would work for online & phone orders since the time is displayed at the order summary page before we send the order. Any insight would be greatly appreciated since I have already reached out to FT and could not get the times to improve.