8 ms·

Explanation of the Domino's Pizza tracker

133 points by danso 4y ago

post_break 4y ago
Funny to see Snubs on here. Shout out to Hak5, been following them since the beginning, even visited the hack house back in like 2008 I think.
Overtonwindow 4y ago
I thought it was GPS
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  That's just the last part when the pizza is out for delivery. The steps before that all happen in the store.
- astura 4y ago
  The Domino pizza tracker states are "preparing", "baking," "quality check," and "out for delivery" or "ready for pickup." You can't track your delivery driver.
  - naikrovek 4y ago
    oh yes you can. I watched my delivery driver make the journey via map on the order tracker just two weeks ago.
    - nickpeterson 4y ago
      Reminds me of webshit weekly, “dominos, business plan Uber for pizza”.
      - kylehotchkiss 4y ago
        I miss hacker news weekly so badly :(
    - kylehotchkiss 4y ago
      I always thought UPS intentionally obfuscated the live delivery tracker to prevent people from following their package around with their car and demanding it from driver before allocated delivery time
roncesvalles 4y ago
The most surprising part is that the order is communicated to the store over telephone. Surely that can't be the case?
- fknorangesite 4y ago
  This afternoon I overheard a university student refer to a period of time in which I was already an adult as "in the 1900s", so now thanks to this comment I'm really 0-2 here today. Anyway brb putting my other foot in the grave, I guess.
- selectodude 4y ago
  That's only if people call and somebody inputs the order manually. If it's done online, it just automatically shows up on the prep line screen.
  - roncesvalles 4y ago
    Do people who call also get access (SMS link?) to the tracker? If so then I see where I was mistaken.
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  Sometimes it's simply easier to pick up the phone and say, "Two large pepperonis and a box of breadsticks to 123 Avenue Lane please" and pay the delivery driver, rather than stumble through the online order flow. The main reason to order online is that there are always deals.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    According to a quick search, 75% of orders are online now, which means 25% are still phone or walk-in.
  - roncesvalles 4y ago
    I was referring to the line "When the phone CS puts in the order, it goes to the prep line, then bake." What I understood is, when you place an order on the Domino's website, someone in a call-center phones the branch and reads off the online order. It isn't directly sent to a computer at the store.
tonetheman 4y ago
The part about the ovens all running at the same time is funny to me. 10 years from now when some new type of tech is discovered that will let pizza cook faster some lonely programmer somewhere will have to find all the places it was hard coded.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  The pizza ovens at this scale are massive industrial conveyer belts: the bake time is the time it takes the conveyer to move from the start of the oven to the end of the oven. The length of the conveyer belt is influenced by the number of pizzas (and other baked goods such as pastas, wings, and baked desserts) they want to be able to bake in somewhat parallel (obviously it is something more like a queue, but there's a major overlap in baking times of consequent items). The speed of the conveyer belt is influenced by operator safety concerns and also avoiding the "Lucy and Ethel backup problem" (from the famous episode of I Love Lucy about the conveyer belt at the chocolate factory). In many ways, at this industrial scale of oven the pizza recipes (and pasta recipes and wing types and baked desserts and everything else sent through the oven) are calibrated specifically to the bake times of the chosen oven conveyer belt length and speed rather than the other way around. (Which isn't to suggest that such ovens don't get redesigned from time to time, but that's likely a large enough project that Tracker programmer has plenty of lead time.)
  - boomboomsubban 4y ago
    The conveyer pizza ovens I've seen had configurable speeds and temps on them, though nobody ever touched them. I always assumed it was for different altitudes. So the tracker program likely already expects configurable times.
    - toast0 4y ago
      I've seen similar controls on conveyor toasters, and seen conveyor pizza ovens in operation. If you really wanted to adjust the temperature/speed for a particular item, you'd need to leave a gap before and after that item (or group of that items, I guess), and that would ruin your throughput. You really want everything to cook at the same temperature and the same speed. Or you need multiple pipelines, one for each temperature and speed.
tomcam 4y ago
Seems unlikely that each step is actually updated by the workers themselves. I’d put money on an algorithm. The button or tablet they’d have to use would to signify completion would just get loaded with schmutz. Plus they’d be likely to forget to update during peak hours. A foot pedal might work.
- bluetidepro 4y ago
  > Seems unlikely that each step is actually updated by the workers themselves. I’d put money on an algorithm. The button or tablet they’d have to use would to signify completion would just get loaded with schmutz. Plus they’d be likely to forget to update during peak hours. A foot pedal might work. Obviously Twitter is not the best for long form, but did you scroll through the replies from the first tweet that she added? She literally explains how it works, the options workers have, etc. No need to speculate haha
  - tomcam 4y ago
    I did now and you're right. Thanks.
- slackdog 4y ago
  > Seems unlikely that each step is actually updated by the workers themselves. I’d put money on an algorithm. Orders are automatically added to the "prep" stage, and again to the post-oven "quality check" stage. But they aren't automatically moved from the prep stage to the oven stage; I know this because I've had domino orders that get stuck in the prep stage for half an hour and when I show up to pick up my pizza anyway, they admit they haven't started making it yet. The pizza getting added to the oven stage means the workers actually did put the pizza in the oven, or at least told the computer they did so.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- amflare 4y ago
  I worked in fast food during school and there are absolutely physical buttons[0]. They are tiny little pill buttons under a plastic label. They don't get as dirty as you think, mostly because the sanitary requirements in food prep mean that things are never allowed to ever truly get dirty. [0]: https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/img/cb125v2-kds-handle-min.jpg https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/img/cb125v2-kds-handle-min.jpg
itslennysfault 4y ago
You can also just look at the patent to see how it works... https://patents.google.com/patent/US10262281B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US10262281B1/en
wronglebowski 4y ago
I think people fail to recognize how much of everything now is an internet connected computer. This was true at McDonald’s 15 years ago. A bunch of Windows XP embedded machines at various stations(Fries, Salads, Sandwiches, Desserts) getting routed their individual components. In more recent years it’s gone WAY WAY past that level of complexity. Dual lane drive thrus? They have cameras and track which car is which to try and keep orders straight. All of this data feeds into a system so management has a clearer and clearer idea of what’s actually happening in the stores. In a smaller operation like a Dominos it’s super easy to cheat and bump everything off, but once you have any real volume it becomes unmanageable.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I'm actually honestly surprised how FEW errors McDonalds has with those dual order drive throughs feeding into a single line.
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    In my experience, it's extremely common for the operator to select the wrong lane when they're talking to me over the speaker, because I can see my order pop up on the other speaker while my screen stays blank. It seems that the speaker system is totally independent of the screens, probably for redundancy so that they can still take orders if the screens malfunction.
    - jvm___ 4y ago
      Sometimes the person talking to you isn't in the store, they're at a call center for lack of a better word. I heard they were testing it at high volume locations and I assume they rolled it out somewhere by now.
      - frosted-flakes 4y ago
        This was in Canada, and it definitely wasn't high volume or taken from a call centre. If I'm going to McDonald's, it's usually at midnight when there's nothing else open, and there's only one drive-through lane open anyway. And the person on the speaker is the same one who hands me my food.
redlenin_cheese 4y ago
https://mrshll.uk/2021/10/12/thick-description-pizzas/ https://mrshll.uk/2021/10/12/thick-description-pizzas/ More in-depth presentation of the same subject matter.
thunderbong 4y ago
Better readability - https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1630220894919598080.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1630220894919598080.html
jstanley 4y ago
> But if someone is trying to game the system to make corporate believe they get everything done in record time, they can control the system to fake the times. I find this so incredibly annoying. KFC and McDonald's near me have screens up saying when your order is being "prepared" and when it is "ready to collect", except the "ready to collect" column is totally useless because they always put it in "ready to collect" long before it is actually ready to collect.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- e_i_pi_2 4y ago
  I think this is a side effect of "what is measured is managed", combined with people always trying to game systems. If you establish a system to measure how fast people make meals you're just going to get false estimates. The solution I've seen is to trust and then actually manage people if they aren't doing well.
  - tough 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - thaeli 4y ago
      Except that gaming these metrics is in the interests of so many people up and down the chain. The "park everyone strategy" for getting drive thru times down should be a blatantly obvious cheat in the data, but no one cares to go looking for it because it makes the stats look good.
      - xattt 4y ago
        They are going to run out of parking spaces very quickly in my local McDonalds if every customer in the drive-thru decides they want Filet-O-Fish. (All the times I’ve ordered it, it seems to take the exact time it takes to cook it)
kraquepype 4y ago
Thank you, I was just wondering a few days ago how it worked - if it was all an approximation, manual inputs, or some level of automation. Time for an anecdote; Years ago, when the pizza tracker was new, I worked on a team that deployed/managed bare metal and physical Linux hosts. Someone higher up got excited about it and then we had to have discussions about having a "pizza tracker" for our server deploy process. Fun times...
jamdav16 4y ago
Fun fact: Domino's Australia is the R&D capital for Domino's worldwide. All the latest tech gets developed and tested here. Surprised they haven't rolled out their tech worldwide yet... All stores have a DRU Pizza Checker (AI powered camera to check every pizza as it comes out of the oven)[1][2]. Some stores in the state of Queensland even have automated DOM robots to deliver pizzas[3] and even drones[4]. Source: Worked closely with Domino's in an old job (not employed by Domino's). Their office was super fun to navigate through with robotics engineers, software developers and more working on some impressive stuff. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp0Tc7hyNKw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp0Tc7hyNKw [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciakelso/2020/07/01/dominos-australia-is-continuing-its-ai-partnershipa-strong-vote-of-confidence-for-the-technology/?sh=55f1e8e220fd https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciakelso/2020/07/01/dominos-... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb0nxQyv7RU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb0nxQyv7RU [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BrrUU7YO08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BrrUU7YO08
balls187 4y ago
Shout out to my man Jacob at the Renton Domino’s. Tracker is always accurate and the pizza is always good. For my small family, domino’s (using coupons) is a great option. My wife loves the gluten free pizza.
- mostertoaster 4y ago
  Oh yeah. I order one 2 topping large pizza a week, for $5.50. Three lunches.
urbandw311er 4y ago
I’ve noticed my local McDonalds fakes their prep times by pretending all the orders are “ready to collect” (then immediately marked as collected) on the system way before they’re ready. As a customer it’s really annoying because you go up to collect it and are told (as if it’s your fault) to go away and they’ll call you. I wonder who I could complain to? Presumably the local manager is actually in on it so they look good to head office.

133 points by danso 4y ago

Funny to see Snubs on here. Shout out to Hak5, been following them since the beginning, even visited the hack house back in like 2008 I think.

Overtonwindow 4y ago

I thought it was GPS

AlexandrB 4y ago
That's just the last part when the pizza is out for delivery. The steps before that all happen in the store.
astura 4y ago
The Domino pizza tracker states are "preparing", "baking," "quality check," and "out for delivery" or "ready for pickup." You can't track your delivery driver.
- naikrovek 4y ago
  oh yes you can. I watched my delivery driver make the journey via map on the order tracker just two weeks ago.
  - nickpeterson 4y ago
    Reminds me of webshit weekly, “dominos, business plan Uber for pizza”.
    - kylehotchkiss 4y ago
      I miss hacker news weekly so badly :(
  - kylehotchkiss 4y ago
    I always thought UPS intentionally obfuscated the live delivery tracker to prevent people from following their package around with their car and demanding it from driver before allocated delivery time

roncesvalles 4y ago

The most surprising part is that the order is communicated to the store over telephone. Surely that can't be the case?

fknorangesite 4y ago
This afternoon I overheard a university student refer to a period of time in which I was already an adult as "in the 1900s", so now thanks to this comment I'm really 0-2 here today. Anyway brb putting my other foot in the grave, I guess.
selectodude 4y ago
That's only if people call and somebody inputs the order manually. If it's done online, it just automatically shows up on the prep line screen.
- roncesvalles 4y ago
  Do people who call also get access (SMS link?) to the tracker? If so then I see where I was mistaken.
frosted-flakes 4y ago
Sometimes it's simply easier to pick up the phone and say, "Two large pepperonis and a box of breadsticks to 123 Avenue Lane please" and pay the delivery driver, rather than stumble through the online order flow. The main reason to order online is that there are always deals.
- bombcar 4y ago
  According to a quick search, 75% of orders are online now, which means 25% are still phone or walk-in.
- roncesvalles 4y ago
  I was referring to the line "When the phone CS puts in the order, it goes to the prep line, then bake." What I understood is, when you place an order on the Domino's website, someone in a call-center phones the branch and reads off the online order. It isn't directly sent to a computer at the store.

tonetheman 4y ago

The part about the ovens all running at the same time is funny to me. 10 years from now when some new type of tech is discovered that will let pizza cook faster some lonely programmer somewhere will have to find all the places it was hard coded.

WorldMaker 4y ago
The pizza ovens at this scale are massive industrial conveyer belts: the bake time is the time it takes the conveyer to move from the start of the oven to the end of the oven. The length of the conveyer belt is influenced by the number of pizzas (and other baked goods such as pastas, wings, and baked desserts) they want to be able to bake in somewhat parallel (obviously it is something more like a queue, but there's a major overlap in baking times of consequent items). The speed of the conveyer belt is influenced by operator safety concerns and also avoiding the "Lucy and Ethel backup problem" (from the famous episode of I Love Lucy about the conveyer belt at the chocolate factory). In many ways, at this industrial scale of oven the pizza recipes (and pasta recipes and wing types and baked desserts and everything else sent through the oven) are calibrated specifically to the bake times of the chosen oven conveyer belt length and speed rather than the other way around. (Which isn't to suggest that such ovens don't get redesigned from time to time, but that's likely a large enough project that Tracker programmer has plenty of lead time.)
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  The conveyer pizza ovens I've seen had configurable speeds and temps on them, though nobody ever touched them. I always assumed it was for different altitudes. So the tracker program likely already expects configurable times.
  - toast0 4y ago
    I've seen similar controls on conveyor toasters, and seen conveyor pizza ovens in operation. If you really wanted to adjust the temperature/speed for a particular item, you'd need to leave a gap before and after that item (or group of that items, I guess), and that would ruin your throughput. You really want everything to cook at the same temperature and the same speed. Or you need multiple pipelines, one for each temperature and speed.

tomcam 4y ago

Seems unlikely that each step is actually updated by the workers themselves. I’d put money on an algorithm. The button or tablet they’d have to use would to signify completion would just get loaded with schmutz. Plus they’d be likely to forget to update during peak hours. A foot pedal might work.

bluetidepro 4y ago
> Seems unlikely that each step is actually updated by the workers themselves. I’d put money on an algorithm. The button or tablet they’d have to use would to signify completion would just get loaded with schmutz. Plus they’d be likely to forget to update during peak hours. A foot pedal might work. Obviously Twitter is not the best for long form, but did you scroll through the replies from the first tweet that she added? She literally explains how it works, the options workers have, etc. No need to speculate haha
- tomcam 4y ago
  I did now and you're right. Thanks.
slackdog 4y ago
> Seems unlikely that each step is actually updated by the workers themselves. I’d put money on an algorithm. Orders are automatically added to the "prep" stage, and again to the post-oven "quality check" stage. But they aren't automatically moved from the prep stage to the oven stage; I know this because I've had domino orders that get stuck in the prep stage for half an hour and when I show up to pick up my pizza anyway, they admit they haven't started making it yet. The pizza getting added to the oven stage means the workers actually did put the pizza in the oven, or at least told the computer they did so.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
amflare 4y ago
I worked in fast food during school and there are absolutely physical buttons[0]. They are tiny little pill buttons under a plastic label. They don't get as dirty as you think, mostly because the sanitary requirements in food prep mean that things are never allowed to ever truly get dirty. [0]: https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/img/cb125v2-kds-handle-min.jpg https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/img/cb125v2-kds-handle-min.jpg

itslennysfault 4y ago

You can also just look at the patent to see how it works... https://patents.google.com/patent/US10262281B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US10262281B1/en

wronglebowski 4y ago

I think people fail to recognize how much of everything now is an internet connected computer. This was true at McDonald’s 15 years ago. A bunch of Windows XP embedded machines at various stations(Fries, Salads, Sandwiches, Desserts) getting routed their individual components. In more recent years it’s gone WAY WAY past that level of complexity. Dual lane drive thrus? They have cameras and track which car is which to try and keep orders straight. All of this data feeds into a system so management has a clearer and clearer idea of what’s actually happening in the stores. In a smaller operation like a Dominos it’s super easy to cheat and bump everything off, but once you have any real volume it becomes unmanageable.

bombcar 4y ago
I'm actually honestly surprised how FEW errors McDonalds has with those dual order drive throughs feeding into a single line.
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  In my experience, it's extremely common for the operator to select the wrong lane when they're talking to me over the speaker, because I can see my order pop up on the other speaker while my screen stays blank. It seems that the speaker system is totally independent of the screens, probably for redundancy so that they can still take orders if the screens malfunction.
  - jvm___ 4y ago
    Sometimes the person talking to you isn't in the store, they're at a call center for lack of a better word. I heard they were testing it at high volume locations and I assume they rolled it out somewhere by now.
    - frosted-flakes 4y ago
      This was in Canada, and it definitely wasn't high volume or taken from a call centre. If I'm going to McDonald's, it's usually at midnight when there's nothing else open, and there's only one drive-through lane open anyway. And the person on the speaker is the same one who hands me my food.

redlenin_cheese 4y ago

https://mrshll.uk/2021/10/12/thick-description-pizzas/ https://mrshll.uk/2021/10/12/thick-description-pizzas/ More in-depth presentation of the same subject matter.

thunderbong 4y ago

Better readability - https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1630220894919598080.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1630220894919598080.html

jstanley 4y ago

> But if someone is trying to game the system to make corporate believe they get everything done in record time, they can control the system to fake the times. I find this so incredibly annoying. KFC and McDonald's near me have screens up saying when your order is being "prepared" and when it is "ready to collect", except the "ready to collect" column is totally useless because they always put it in "ready to collect" long before it is actually ready to collect.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
e_i_pi_2 4y ago
I think this is a side effect of "what is measured is managed", combined with people always trying to game systems. If you establish a system to measure how fast people make meals you're just going to get false estimates. The solution I've seen is to trust and then actually manage people if they aren't doing well.
- tough 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - thaeli 4y ago
    Except that gaming these metrics is in the interests of so many people up and down the chain. The "park everyone strategy" for getting drive thru times down should be a blatantly obvious cheat in the data, but no one cares to go looking for it because it makes the stats look good.
    - xattt 4y ago
      They are going to run out of parking spaces very quickly in my local McDonalds if every customer in the drive-thru decides they want Filet-O-Fish. (All the times I’ve ordered it, it seems to take the exact time it takes to cook it)

kraquepype 4y ago

Thank you, I was just wondering a few days ago how it worked - if it was all an approximation, manual inputs, or some level of automation. Time for an anecdote; Years ago, when the pizza tracker was new, I worked on a team that deployed/managed bare metal and physical Linux hosts. Someone higher up got excited about it and then we had to have discussions about having a "pizza tracker" for our server deploy process. Fun times...

jamdav16 4y ago

Fun fact: Domino's Australia is the R&D capital for Domino's worldwide. All the latest tech gets developed and tested here. Surprised they haven't rolled out their tech worldwide yet... All stores have a DRU Pizza Checker (AI powered camera to check every pizza as it comes out of the oven)[1][2]. Some stores in the state of Queensland even have automated DOM robots to deliver pizzas[3] and even drones[4]. Source: Worked closely with Domino's in an old job (not employed by Domino's). Their office was super fun to navigate through with robotics engineers, software developers and more working on some impressive stuff. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp0Tc7hyNKw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp0Tc7hyNKw [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciakelso/2020/07/01/dominos-australia-is-continuing-its-ai-partnershipa-strong-vote-of-confidence-for-the-technology/?sh=55f1e8e220fd https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciakelso/2020/07/01/dominos-... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb0nxQyv7RU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb0nxQyv7RU [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BrrUU7YO08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BrrUU7YO08

balls187 4y ago

Shout out to my man Jacob at the Renton Domino’s. Tracker is always accurate and the pizza is always good. For my small family, domino’s (using coupons) is a great option. My wife loves the gluten free pizza.

mostertoaster 4y ago
Oh yeah. I order one 2 topping large pizza a week, for $5.50. Three lunches.

urbandw311er 4y ago

I’ve noticed my local McDonalds fakes their prep times by pretending all the orders are “ready to collect” (then immediately marked as collected) on the system way before they’re ready. As a customer it’s really annoying because you go up to collect it and are told (as if it’s your fault) to go away and they’ll call you. I wonder who I could complain to? Presumably the local manager is actually in on it so they look good to head office.