Today, most restaurants are searching for ways to streamline their operations, improve customer satisfaction and cope with a shortage of skilled workers. A kitchen display system (KDS) can help on all counts. These systems offer many significant benefits, including increased efficiency, less errors in customer order and food waste. All of these benefits lead to a better customer service experience and happier customers.

What is a KDS?

A KDS is a digital system — ideally integrated with a restaurant’s point-of-sale (POS) and online ordering systems — that instantly transmits orders to one or more tablet-like screens in the kitchen. It’s much more than a high-tech replacement for paper order tickets, however. The best KDS solutions can be customized with recipes, preparation and cook times, and other information about your menu. This allows you to prioritize orders based on prep time and other criteria, to track orders in real time, and to improve communications between front and back of house.

What are the Benefits?

A KDS can provide a variety of valuable benefits, including:

Increasing Efficiency
A KDS streamlines the order preparation process by ensuring that the kitchen receives orders instantly and coordinates orders by priority and timing. For example, once a server enters an order into the POS system, the KDS immediately alerts the kitchen staff to begin preparing appetizers. Programmed with prep and cooking times for various dishes, the system helps ensure that dishes are sequenced properly so that a table’s orders are ready at the same time and served at the right temperature. Say a couple orders steak frites, one medium and one medium rare. The KDS sends the medium steak order to the grill first, followed by the medium rare steak, but doesn’t cue the fryer until shortly before the orders are ready to be served.

By automating the process of routing items to the right stations at the right times, a KDS eliminates the need for a person to coordinate the process. This allows restaurants to do more with less, helping alleviate the impact of the labor shortage.

Reducing Errors and Waste
A digital system eliminates the possibility that order tickets will be lost. It also minimizes the chances that handwritten instructions will be misread or missed altogether. Food allergies or special requests (e.g., “no tomatoes,” “dressing on the side,” etc.) can be displayed conspicuously and even color-coded to ensure that kitchen staff doesn’t miss them. By avoiding mistakes and miscommunications, a KDS helps reduce food waste.

Enhancing Communication
A KDS greatly enhances communications between front of house and back of house. In addition to ensuring that orders are transmitted accurately, the system can provide real-time order status updates to servers (or directly to customers in the case of online orders). It also allows servers or customers to make last-minute changes to orders after they’ve been entered, with assurances that they will find their way to the ticket. The system can also alert the kitchen to orders that have gone beyond their expected preparation and cooking times and need to be prioritized.

Improving Customer Satisfaction
By helping to ensure that orders are fulfilled accurately and quickly, and that parties receive their orders together and at the proper temperature, a KDS can significantly improve the customer experience. Restaurants that provide great customer service experiences can be assured of repeat visits from satisfied customers.

Tracking Performance
A bonus of implementing a KDS is that it can track valuable data — such as average cook times, cook time per station, plating to table times and other speed of service metrics — for use in analyzing and evaluating your restaurant’s performance.

A Solid Investment

Implementing a KDS requires an up-front investment in hardware, software and staff training. But in most cases, this investment pays for itself in the form of greater efficiency, enhanced performance and increased customer satisfaction.

For more information about Kitchen Display Systems, please contact Joy Long at [email protected] or 312.670.7444. Visit ORBA.com to learn more about our Restaurant Group. Sign up here to receive our blogs, newsletters and Client Alerts.