Automated production time estimation for food businesses

What if I told you there's a way to make your food production work like a clockwork, not a paperwork? 

For food production to work like clockwork, countless moving parts have to be in sync. Having discussed the case with our customer in the US, we gathered a list of activities that cost food restaurants a lot of time - one of those being the estimated production time. What if there was a way to dynamically calculate the production time, based on load schedule (static data), and turn it into live data that is shown on Point of Sale terminal to the POS worker?

The greatest impact with such an implementation is managing customers' expectations - knowing how much time it will take to prepare their order, they can plan time accordingly - wait in the store or leave to shop around and come back right on time. It also has been proven to affect the customer's experience positively - it is frustrating to sit around and wait for the order, especially if that time is prolonged due to high restaurant load at the time.

From a technical point of view, the changes took place on Microsoft Dynamics side of things - a new web request was created, additional functions enabled on the POS Functionality profile. A new function in the client's additional POS Commands codeunit created which calculates the production time to be displayed on the POS interface based on current kitchen load. The calculated production time is then presented to the user by adding a POS tag to a interface object which returns the calculated production time to display on the Self Service terminals and voila - we have a new functionality up and running.

This is just one of many high impact adjustments that we at Tenging have created this year - take a look at this great new app for retail or the E-commerce API connector that just gone live!