Timing by Order

Absent dining courses, menu item preparation times determine how long it should take to prepare all the items on an order. To do this, the KDS Controller reviews the group of menu items that were sent by POS Operations. The item/suborder with the longest preparation time is fired immediately. This becomes the order's minimum prep time.

Fire times for the rest of the menu items are then calculated to ensure that they are all ready at the same time. This is done by subtracting each item's prep time from the order prep time. The result is the amount of time that the KDS Controller will wait before firing each item.

For example, a customer orders a hamburger, french fries, and soft drink. The established preparation time for a hamburger is 10 minutes, followed by 4 minutes for the fries, and 1 minute for the drink. Because 10 minutes is the longest item prep time for this check, this becomes the baseline for firing all of the suborders. As soon as the check is service totaled, the hamburger is fired. Because the fries will only take 4 minutes to prepare, they are fired at the 6-minute mark (or 4 minutes before the hamburger is expected to be finished). The drink, which only takes 1 minute to prepare, is not displayed on the KDS screen until 9 minutes after the order was posted. As shown in the following figure, all items should be finished at the same time.

Figure 8-1 Sample Item Timings by Order