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I worked at Domino's from about 2011-2013. Their digital system was really impressive to me. The POS was pretty good for fast-food. But what really impressed me

I worked at Domino's from about 2011-2013. Their digital system was really impressive to me. The POS was pretty good for fast-food. But what really impressed me was the station management system, aka the pizza tracker. An order had to be keyed in/out of each station to the next by employee pin. Each station had a screen displaying the pending and in-progress orders. It was connected to the "pizza tracker", so when it said "John is adding your toppings" it really meant someone else had keyed it out of the sauce/cheese station and "John" had keyed it into the toppings station. Orders came in from the cashier or online, then went to dough/sauce/cheese, toppings, oven, prep (cutting and garlic crust sauce, dipping addons), then delivery. Of course on things like superbowl Sunday "John" was just the manager keying in every station and deligating orders manually, because that was still slightly faster. But what really impressed me, after a few other years of various fast food jobs, was that it was not tied to any financial incentives. Managers couldn't view the historical data in any way. There were no bonuses or rewards based on it. So there was no reason to lie and send it to a new station screen early. I had worked at Burger King and Taco Bell prior. At both of those locations there was a similar, but simplified system. You keyed in an order as taken. Then as done. Then as served. From what I could tell, management bonuses were based on certain metrics on these times. The burger king actually had a single 8 segment display hanging in the kitchen showing us our current letter grade (A-F) for performance in the past hour. We were told to just key in any order that would take longer than normal as instantly done. Domino's must have had some great data to optimize their kitchens on. While BK and Taco Bell have their kitchens telling them everything is fine, because they will be punished if they say some new specialty sandwich takes too long to prepare.

thaumasiotes 3y ago
> Managers couldn't view the historical data in any way. There were no bonuses or rewards based on it. So there was no reason to lie and send it to a new station screen early. It seems like the system described would be resilient to that? If there were incentives, tracking, and punishment, the process still involves the earlier-stage employee keying the pizza out and then the later-stage employee keying it in. If the earlier-stage guy benefits from lying about how quickly he finishes his stage of the pizza, how does he persuade the later-stage guy to take the fall of incredible slowness by keying the pizza in to his stage early?
- squeaky-clean 3y ago
  At the other places I worked, the main persuasion was the manager being less of a hard-ass. With delivery it's a bit harder, customers will probably complain if the online tracker says it was delivered and it actually is still in the oven. I still think not tying metrics into goals made a big difference. The manager goals were things like store profit and customer satisfaction surveys.
cambo 3y ago
I worked on/around Pulse (the POS system), Pizza tracker (GPS), Order screen, and other backend systems in the largest Non-US market for a few years. Other than Pulse, most of the instore software appears to have been market specific. The managers didn't have person specific data, but the Franchisee and Headoffice does -at least in my market. Also Tracker data was used for awards at the end of the year at Rally by the head office (best avg delivery time, most deliveries, highest reviews, etc - again this was out of the GPS system). The in store tracking data was never clean enough to profile employees in our market as the instore people were trained to move and cover others during a crunch. (to the extent that in our market we didnt' track instore stations that often) In my time at a national Dominos HQ (several years), we were told Pulse was being re-written but it never arrived. It was managed by the US HQ, and all the international franchises (Each country is a franchise, that then subfranchises) were required to license it -we assumed it was calling sales #'s home to validate franchisee payments. The POS system has to handle an enormous db of combos/deals/sizes and then filter by available ingredients, national sales, buy one get one, franchisee overrides, which was then patched to have overrides that match the online ordering every hour. (eg. national large peperoni sale, limited by franchisee to just buy two get one deal, only off peak, on tuesdays, when sales are slow). Oh and it has to run on comodity hardware that the franchisee paid for 5 years ago and is too cheap to replace. The fun logic was in profiling stores and making predictions about ingredients requirements.
- squeaky-clean 3y ago
  That's really cool. I gotta say as an employee, the system was pretty awesome. My store also had computers for the POS which were orders of magnitudes better than any restaurant I had worked, which probably helped as well. I worked a corporate store, which might be a difference. But I remember our awards being only based on orders delivered, time until ready for delivery, and customer reviews. I was told actual delivery time wasn't up for awards because they didn't want to encourage reckless driving. There also wasn't any sort of GPS system for drivers, so tracking that would have been unreliable anyways. I was one of the only guys with a Garmin and the old-timers made fun of me for using it. I'm surprised there wasn't more profiling the data for bottlenecks on the menu. I remember several improvements while I was there. The bottle for the garlic crust sauce was changed which made it way less messy to use. And the pan pizza underwent like 5 revisions. I think my store was one of the first to trial it because at first it underwent changes every other week. The first version took at least 3x as long as a regular "hand tossed" pizza to go from ordered to oven. It was such a pain. They eventually made it as fast to make as a regular pizza. I always assumed they were using the tracker system to help notice this. > The fun logic was in profiling stores and making predictions about ingredients requirements. So here's a funny story. Every weekend my store would run out of feta. The nearest neighboring store would also run out of pepperoni. Neither store's management reported it or anything, instead our stores would do a trade of feta for pepperoni every Friday.

thaumasiotes 3y ago

> Managers couldn't view the historical data in any way. There were no bonuses or rewards based on it. So there was no reason to lie and send it to a new station screen early. It seems like the system described would be resilient to that? If there were incentives, tracking, and punishment, the process still involves the earlier-stage employee keying the pizza out and then the later-stage employee keying it in. If the earlier-stage guy benefits from lying about how quickly he finishes his stage of the pizza, how does he persuade the later-stage guy to take the fall of incredible slowness by keying the pizza in to his stage early?

squeaky-clean 3y ago
At the other places I worked, the main persuasion was the manager being less of a hard-ass. With delivery it's a bit harder, customers will probably complain if the online tracker says it was delivered and it actually is still in the oven. I still think not tying metrics into goals made a big difference. The manager goals were things like store profit and customer satisfaction surveys.

cambo 3y ago

I worked on/around Pulse (the POS system), Pizza tracker (GPS), Order screen, and other backend systems in the largest Non-US market for a few years. Other than Pulse, most of the instore software appears to have been market specific. The managers didn't have person specific data, but the Franchisee and Headoffice does -at least in my market. Also Tracker data was used for awards at the end of the year at Rally by the head office (best avg delivery time, most deliveries, highest reviews, etc - again this was out of the GPS system). The in store tracking data was never clean enough to profile employees in our market as the instore people were trained to move and cover others during a crunch. (to the extent that in our market we didnt' track instore stations that often) In my time at a national Dominos HQ (several years), we were told Pulse was being re-written but it never arrived. It was managed by the US HQ, and all the international franchises (Each country is a franchise, that then subfranchises) were required to license it -we assumed it was calling sales #'s home to validate franchisee payments. The POS system has to handle an enormous db of combos/deals/sizes and then filter by available ingredients, national sales, buy one get one, franchisee overrides, which was then patched to have overrides that match the online ordering every hour. (eg. national large peperoni sale, limited by franchisee to just buy two get one deal, only off peak, on tuesdays, when sales are slow). Oh and it has to run on comodity hardware that the franchisee paid for 5 years ago and is too cheap to replace. The fun logic was in profiling stores and making predictions about ingredients requirements.

squeaky-clean 3y ago
That's really cool. I gotta say as an employee, the system was pretty awesome. My store also had computers for the POS which were orders of magnitudes better than any restaurant I had worked, which probably helped as well. I worked a corporate store, which might be a difference. But I remember our awards being only based on orders delivered, time until ready for delivery, and customer reviews. I was told actual delivery time wasn't up for awards because they didn't want to encourage reckless driving. There also wasn't any sort of GPS system for drivers, so tracking that would have been unreliable anyways. I was one of the only guys with a Garmin and the old-timers made fun of me for using it. I'm surprised there wasn't more profiling the data for bottlenecks on the menu. I remember several improvements while I was there. The bottle for the garlic crust sauce was changed which made it way less messy to use. And the pan pizza underwent like 5 revisions. I think my store was one of the first to trial it because at first it underwent changes every other week. The first version took at least 3x as long as a regular "hand tossed" pizza to go from ordered to oven. It was such a pain. They eventually made it as fast to make as a regular pizza. I always assumed they were using the tracker system to help notice this. > The fun logic was in profiling stores and making predictions about ingredients requirements. So here's a funny story. Every weekend my store would run out of feta. The nearest neighboring store would also run out of pepperoni. Neither store's management reported it or anything, instead our stores would do a trade of feta for pepperoni every Friday.