As the competition grows ever fiercer and restaurant owners are tasked with boosting efficiency to keep up, technology plays an increasingly important role in operations.
Solutions that were once used only by major national chains are now accessible to businesses of all sizes. Kitchen display systems fall into this category. These systems replace traditional methods like receipt printers and handwritten orders, and are used by restaurant owners all over to streamline kitchen operations.
If you haven’t already considered investing in a kitchen display system, here are six reasons why you should:
Increased overall speed
With a kitchen display system, you can cut out the middleman. Rather than having servers handwrite orders and then deliver them to the kitchen, a kitchen display system sends orders to your kitchen staff directly. This can save time and money.
When orders are handwritten and given to kitchen staff, they can easily be lost or misread, leading to confusion, disorganization, and misunderstandings. Using a kitchen display system can virtually eliminate this confusion. Kitchen displays automatically organize orders by priority and clarify order details so that every order can be prepared exactly to the customer’s specifications.
Greater accuracy
Another issue with handwritten orders that restaurant owners frequently encounter is errors. Handwritten slips and printed tickets can be misplaced, leading to orders getting lost in the hustle and bustle. You can run into the same issue with printed tickets. These little slips of paper can fall from where they were pinned, or they can get passed around and mixed up. Priority gets forgotten, and all of this leads to errors.
During rush hours, in their efforts to take orders quickly and get them to the cooks as soon as possible, its easy for neat handwriting to go out the window. While writing in shorthand can speed up the process on the server’s end, trying to decipher those orders is a whole different ballgame.
A kitchen display is great for these instances. They provide clear, easy-to-read instructions for each order, complete with modifiers and customer instructions, so that your kitchen staff can better prioritize, and you can achieve greater accuracy.
Better visibility
Without a kitchen display system, it becomes much more difficult to accurately track the time it takes to fulfill each order. This information is critical. It helps you identify areas of improvement and pinpoint any bottlenecks holding up the process. It can clue you in on which staff members may require additional training, and who your top performers are in the kitchen and use that data to conduct better scheduling.
By integrating a kitchen display system into your POS, you can consolidate data and access a variety of reporting features. These clue you in on a number of metrics that you can then use to monitor your operations. These can help you identify causations and correlations between different factors that can influence your staff’s performance. That way, when you offer a special and see that your staff took much longer to prepare that dish than the rest, you can determine whether you need to train your staff better or perhaps offer a simplified version of the dish that takes less time to prepare.
Smoother operations
On top of eliminating order errors and speeding up the process, kitchen displays also simplify operations, making them smoother and altogether more efficient. By setting up different displays for different prep stations, you send each order to the correct prep station so they can begin working on them. Kitchen displays can also alert staff when they are falling behind, so they can know right away when they need to ramp up their efforts to get orders out on time.
Increased customer satisfaction
By increasing the speed of service within your restaurant, you can directly increase customer satisfaction. Sometimes, all it takes is one wrong order or one bad experience to cause a customer to leave a negative review.
Bad experiences can turn loyal customers away and put a blemish on your reputation. By implementing technology that helps your staff work more efficiently, you can increase your speed of service and reduce errors and wait times. When your kitchen is operating at top speed, you can satisfy customers and boost loyalty.
Decreased costs
Order errors don’t just cost you in reputation and customer satisfaction—they cost you in food waste. When incorrect orders have to be remade, they often have to be done from scratch. Sure, sometimes it’s a simple fix and you can save the original order, but more often than not, a dish must be re-created from scratch and prepared differently to correct it.
On top of that, you lose out on money from paper waste when you rely on paper order slips. Receipt paper isn’t cheap, and restaurants can go through paper very quickly. By switching to a digital alternative, you can seriously cut down on paper waste. As an added bonus, you can keep your kitchen space clean and free of paper debris.
Finding the right kitchen display system
If you are considering investing in a kitchen display system, it’s important that you are careful and selective. Not all displays are created equal. Make sure you work with a reputable provider that knows your industry and has the expertise to assist you.
Focus POS offers high-quality displays that simplify restaurant operations and boost your overall order accuracy. For more information on the technology we offer, contact an expert at Focus POS today!
