Kitchen display system for restaurants: when it beats printed tickets

A kitchen display system, or KDS, replaces printed order tickets with a screen at each station. It will not make a grill hotter or a cook faster. What it can do is stop dishes from one table leaving at different times, and stop orders from disappearing behind the pass. In a small kitchen with one cook, it may do nothing a ticket rail does not already do. This guide gives you a rule for deciding, and a figure in Tunisian dinars for what a bad ticket costs.

What a kitchen display system changes

Orders leave the till and appear at the station that cooks them. Three things change.

Each station sees only its own work. The fryer does not read the couscous for table 4. The brik goes to the fryer, the ojja to the hot line, the salad to the cold station.

Time becomes visible. A timer can be read from across the kitchen. A printed time forces cooks to do subtraction at the worst possible moment.

The dining room knows the status. A waiter can see that table 9 is marked ready without walking into the kitchen to ask.

The price is more than the hardware. You need a device protected from heat and grease, a power point, a stable connection, and a team that taps the screen each time a dish is done. If nobody taps, the screen fills up and becomes useless within two services.

Where paper still wins

Paper deserves a fair hearing. A thermal ticket needs nothing switched on, travels with the plate, and takes a pen stroke. One cook working a rail already gets orders in sequence, and that setup has no screen to break.

Paper breaks down in four situations:

• Several stations. You either print several copies or walk the paper around, and one station ends up waiting without knowing it.
• Second rounds. A table adds dishes, and the new ticket lands far from the first with nothing linking them.
• Physical loss. Tickets fall in the sink, get wet or stick under a plate.
• No clock. Nothing on the paper shows how long the order has been waiting.

KDS or tickets: a four-question rule

Answer quickly, and count your yes answers.

Zero or one yes: keep tickets and tidy the rail. Two yes: try a screen on your busiest station. Three or four yes: equip every hot station.

The 40-ticket line is a rule of thumb from the field, not a published standard, so adjust it to your kitchen. A pizzeria with a single oven copes with more tickets than a restaurant with three stations.

What does a lost ticket cost in dinars?

Here is an example to replace with your own figures. A restaurant serves 120 covers a day, 26 days a month. Two dishes in every hundred are redone or forgotten because of a bad ticket. The average dish has 7.000 DT of ingredients (a point separates the millimes).

• Dishes redone per day: 120 × 2% = 2.4
• Ingredients lost per day: 2.4 × 7.000 DT = 16.800 DT
• Ingredients lost per month: 16.800 × 26 = 436.800 DT
• Over a year: 436.800 × 12 = 5,241.600 DT

That leaves out the free dish offered as an apology and the guest who never comes back. It also assumes the screen would fix every error, and it will not. If you think it would fix half, count 2,620.800 DT a year and compare that with twelve months of device and subscription.

Do not guess your 2%. For one week, tape a sheet at the pass and mark a cross for each dish redone. If you do not know your cost per dish, start with the food cost formula or the food cost calculator (in French).

Where to mount the screen

Position decides whether the screen gets used. Check these before you drill.

• Eye level, within two metres of the cook.
• Away from the fryer and grill, out of the steam column.
• On the side the cook naturally turns to, not behind them.
• On an arm or stand that wipes clean, with the cable protected.
• Tested with greasy or gloved hands. If tapping is awkward, the team will stop.

Cafes face a different question. An express or a capucin leaves the counter with no need for a screen. Crêpes, sandwiches and makloub are the items that benefit, and only if they come out of a separate kitchen.

A one-week plan for moving off paper

Never switch on a Friday night. This plan keeps paper running until the screen has proved itself.

The invisible work happens on Monday. If the brik is assigned to the wrong station, it will go there all week. Your till has to send those orders correctly too, so check that in our restaurant POS guide.

Three mistakes that sink the switch

1. Showing everything to everyone. A screen that displays the whole order at each station is a worse version of a ticket.
2. Never marking dishes ready. The timers lose all meaning, and the dining room stops looking.
3. Hiding notes in the dish name. Requests such as no harissa or well done belong on the line of the dish, in plain words.

If you are building a kitchen from scratch, cost the screen as part of the restaurant opening budget.

The Tracer kitchen display

Tracer’s KDS routes each dish to its station with item notes, course numbers and timers, and the kitchen moves orders from new to in kitchen, ready and served on a phone or tablet. The desktop app keeps kitchen and till talking over the local network when the connection drops, and existing thermal printers usually keep working at the stations where you prefer paper. It comes with the POS in the Pro plan, 149 DT a month billed annually.