Payment systems while working at a pizza place
I worked at Domino&#x27;s from about 2011-2013. Their digital system was really impressive to me. The POS was pretty good for fast-food. But what really impressed me was the station management system, aka the pizza tracker.<p>An order had to be keyed in&#x2F;out of each station to the next by employee pin. Each station had a screen displaying the pending and in-progress orders. It was connected to the &quot;pizza tracker&quot;, so when it said &quot;John is adding your toppings&quot; it really meant someone else had keyed it out of the sauce&#x2F;cheese station and &quot;John&quot; had keyed it into the toppings station. Orders came in from the cashier or online, then went to dough&#x2F;sauce&#x2F;cheese, toppings, oven, prep (cutting and garlic crust sauce, dipping addons), then delivery.<p>Of course on things like superbowl Sunday &quot;John&quot; was just the manager keying in every station and deligating orders manually, because that was still slightly faster.<p>But what really impressed me, after a few other years of various fast food jobs, was that it was not tied to any financial incentives. Managers couldn&#x27;t view the historical data in any way. There were no bonuses or rewards based on it. So there was no reason to lie and send it to a new station screen early.<p>I had worked at Burger King and Taco Bell prior. At both of those locations there was a similar, but simplified system. You keyed in an order as taken. Then as done. Then as served. From what I could tell, management bonuses were based on certain metrics on these times. The burger king actually had a single 8 segment display hanging in the kitchen showing us our current letter grade (A-F) for performance in the past hour. We were told to just key in any order that would take longer than normal as instantly done.<p>Domino&#x27;s must have had some great data to optimize their kitchens on. While BK and Taco Bell have their kitchens telling them everything is fine, because they will be punished if they say some new specialty sandwich takes too long to prepare.