What speed of service actually measures

The number is a subtraction, and both ends are choices

Every speed-of-service figure is one time taken away from another. What makes two kitchens uncomparable is not the arithmetic, it is that they rarely start and stop the clock at the same moment.

Start it when the guest ordered, and you are measuring your front of house as much as your kitchen. Start it when the ticket reached the screen, and you are measuring the kitchen but hiding any delay in front of it. Stop it at the bump, and you are measuring cooking. Stop it when the plate leaves the pass, and you are measuring cooking plus whatever happened while it sat under the light.

None of those four choices is wrong. Picking one and writing it down is what turns the number into something you can act on, and it is the step almost everybody skips.

One threshold for every order type is the wrong threshold

The most common mistake after that one is judging every ticket against a single number. A table's ticket and a take-out ticket should not turn red at the same pace, because the consequence of being late is not the same in the two cases.

So the threshold is a setting, per order type, and the colours change on the numbers you chose rather than on numbers somebody else chose for you. If your delivery window is the thing that hurts when you miss it, that order type gets the tighter threshold and the dining room gets the looser one.

Set them from what your kitchen already knows. A threshold you argued about for ten minutes with the people who cook is worth more than a default that nobody in the building selected.

A colour is a decision, so it has to be readable

A timer that changes colour is making a decision on the cook's behalf, which means the colour has to survive the room it is read in. Ours are colourblind-safe, and the board offers five font sizes in light and dark, for the screen that is eight feet away and covered in steam.

This sounds like a detail and it is not. A threshold nobody can see across the pass is a threshold that does not exist, and the kitchen goes back to judging tickets by feel while the setting quietly reports success.

What we do not measure for you

Live metrics on the kitchen screen are on our plan and are not built. That is on our features page in the table of things we have not shipped, and we would rather you read it there before you buy than discover it on your first shift.

So the honest position today is that the screen enforces the thresholds you set and records every bump, and the reporting catches up when the connection does. What it does not do yet is show you a running scoreboard while you cook.

The one thing to do on your next shift

Get the two or three people who run service to agree, out loud, on the moment the clock starts and the moment it stops. Write it on the wall. Every number you collect afterwards means something, and every number you collected before it means less than you thought.