How is everyone dealing with order throttling/kitchen capacities?

[HoneysFCP]

Hi all! In our restaurant, about 60% of our sales are takeout orders, placed through our website. I'm curious to see how others are handling kitchen capacity limits, since Square is severely lacking in this area. I know I can set a capacity cap based on the number of orders for a 15 minute block, but this is obviously useless. Setting a cap of 5 orders per time block could allow for five items to come through to the kitchen, or 50. Obviously, these are very different amounts of food to produce in 15 minutes.

My concern is that by setting volume controls at the per-order level, I risk not optimizing my time block (if single item orders come in), or having a slammed kitchen if those orders happen to be large. How is everyone else dealing with this? I'm amazed that there aren't capacity controls at the per-item (or even total aggregate prep time) level. Are their any third party tools that can help? I looked at Stream, which has robust features for order throttling but...surprise! They don't apply to orders placed via Square Online.

Am I missing something obvious? How do I ensure that my kitchen is busy enough, but not too busy?

[TessC]

@HoneysFCP we are just preparing to launch Square online ordering, and I would love to learn more about this issue. Could I also connect with you about overall throughput and workflow? 

[PizzaDive]

Under Advanced Settings within Fulfilment, you can set an item-limit cap per order. That's the best solution we have come up with. Square won't be able to have more robust throttling until they actually assign times to all order tickets, include POS-generated ones. Think of a ticket that comes through for the next day, that currently counts against your Square 15-min order limit too. Lots of improvement is possible here for sure!

[Eddiemunster]

I've been on about this for years too.  We are a pizza restaurant & food trucks and throttling per order really doesn't work.  Since square allows individual prep times to be set, it would be great to be able to utilise this timing and throttle per item-we have a manual system for this and mark off a manual form-but it would be ideal if square could manage this and all orders (online, counter, dine in etc). 

[RoniM]

You are able to set a specific prep time for each item individually in addition to the default prep time. As well as setting maximum orders allowed per 15 minute window. Unless you’re talking about something else?

[indianathomas]

We handle this on an integration level basis.  Currently, there are seven integrations in our stores.  

1. Website
2. Doordash
3. Uber
4. App
5. Gruphub
6. ChowNow
7. Kiosk

Each integration has some level of control.  Doordash is about 70% of our total orders.  We can go in and set the threshold based on how crazy it gets.  AI is also being implemented, which will automate this process in the future.

[makedonas]

Currently a combination of:

1. Advanced Settings >  Fulfilment, number of items-limit cap per order.

2. The capacity cap based on the number of orders per 15 minutes.

3. Item level cap. How many of that items can be added to an order. 
4. the various custom controls for 3rd party delivery (Uber, Doordash etc) 

I constantly have to fiddle with the number of orders per 15min setting 🤦🏻‍♂️

we need a customizable/optional AI throttle button that incorporates all of the above, PLUS Dine-in Orders workflow. I imagine this will work in tandem with KDS orders.
The data IS there. 
It just needs to be incorporated and customized to how much each kitchen can handle. 
The hard part (possibly impossible) is throttling 3rd party orders from Squares end, BUT throttling all the orders around the 3rd party should be possible, if that was important to some. 
Personally, my Dine-in guests and then my direct website orders would be the top priority. 

This would be an extraordinary achievement and HUGE thing over other POS systems. Or whichever POS gets this done first and correctly. My 2 cents. . 

[Maurice8th]

Well, fortunately I don't have to deal with that. I don't do brick and mortar and when large orders come in, I have access to a commercial kitchen. Best of luck!