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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 tha

by 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.

by cambo 3y ago

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.