Restaurants worldwide are implementing technology enabled systems that helps increase efficiency and make life far easier. Gone are those days when orders from customers used to be printed manually and forwarded to the kitchen. Imagine a system that helps you connect your kitchen to the front-of-house. As soon as the staff completes the process of order taking, the system communicates Kitchen order tickets (KOT) directly to the kitchen. That’s the benefit offered by a Kitchen Display System (KDS).
What is a Kitchen Display System (KDS)?
A KDS is a system that digitizes the entire process of order taking, generating kitchen order tickets and communicating to the chefs. It is a digital order viewer that helps you replace the outdated paper tickets and kitchen printers.
How KDS works hand in hand with restaurant POS systems
Nowadays the KDS is integrated with modern day digital restaurant Point of Sale (POS) systems that make the process quite simple. As soon as the server place the order on a POS system, the details immediately reflects in the KDS screens placed in all departments of the kitchen. It mentions the specifics such as the date and time of the order, order quantity, special requests and table numbers. The orders belonging to the various departments are colour coded differently. It helps avoid confusions and helps kitchen staff easily identify the specific department to which the order belongs. Once the order is ready to be served, the server gets notified.
India’s leading cloud based restaurant management platforms such as inresto POS seamlessly process orders from multiple sources such as third party aggregators, websites and apps. It also enables smooth co-ordination between the chef and the waiter with KOT and KDS that ensures an exceptional experience for the customer.
4 key benefits of Kitchen display systems
Let’s quickly go through how KDS helps restaurants improve their efficiency.
Meal Pacing:
A KDS provides intelligent information to the kitchen about the cook times of the various dishes and the time by which the food needs to be served on the table. Based on the cook times, you can prioritise various dishes so that the food is served hot to the diners. Let’s take the example of grilled chicken that takes a cook time of 20 minutes and grilled salmon that takes 45 minutes. Make it a point to first keep the grilled salmon on the grill as the cook time is more. Ensure that you update the cook times of various dishes in KDS so that the system can generate alerts and you can plan your activities accordingly. You can witness a drastic reduction in the customer wait times comes, and the time taken to serve the dishes.
Course Manager:
This feature of KDS lets you group course items together. The various items can be categorised into different buckets such as soups, desserts, etc. Let’s take an example where there are 5 active tables and 3 have placed an order for French fries. In the traditional system, you will raise separate Kitchen Order Tickets for each table to inform the kitchen staff. However, with the course manager feature, the KDS screen will display all the three tables that ordered French fries. The major benefit is that you can send all the three items in one bucket instead of sending individually. It helps you in considerable time savings, thus making the process more efficient.
Recipe View:
With this feature, the chefs and the kitchen staff get quick access to the recipes and the training manuals. You may also want the kitchen staff to adhere to certain guidelines and procedures. Upload the recipe, the images and videos of dishes and the guidelines to be followed in the KDS system. The advantage is that the staff can easily search and refer to the recipes and manuals whenever they want to.
Assigning to different kitchen sections:
There will be multiple sections in your restaurant kitchen. The KDS ensures that the items are moved correctly to the right sections leaving no scope for confusion.
Parting Words
Technology plays an integral role in modern day restaurant management. With the aid of digital restaurant POS platforms that integrates Kitchen display systems, you can experience significant improvement in terms of efficiency and cost savings.
