How to use Capacity Management?

What is it?

Capacity Management is a feature we provide as part of the Unified e-Commerce solution. It calculates the preparation time based on the status of the your restaurant's kitchen.

It looks at all the Order sources, be that online or in-Store, to calculate the preparation time.

Who can use it?

Once it's set up - Store Managers.

How to configure it?

Please note: Capacity Management is not enabled by default for a Brand. You'd need to request it with the Admin so they can enable it for your business.

Additionally, in the current state, the Brand that wants to use the Capacity Management needs to have Brink as their POS. The main reason for this is that the calculations are done using the KDS (Key Distribution Services) events that are triggered from the kitchen. Without these, the calculations can't be made.

If you're more visual, take a look at this video to learn more about Capacity Management and how it works:

And here's how the setup flows, in writing and a bit more details:

1. The Brand (Brand Manager) asks the Admin to enable Capacity Management
2. The Brand Manager is then able to enable it in the Management Center, in the the Configuration > Product Enablement section. Then, a Capacity Management option will appear and the Brand Manager will need to click on the toggle:
   
3. Now, it's time for the Store Manager to configure the settings that will rule the Capacity Management at the Store level. For that, they need to go to Configurations > Capacity Management:
   
   
   

4. The Store Manager has to click on the Capacity Management and they will arrive to a page where they will be able to enable or disable that feature:
   
   
   

5. If they click on the toggle, a screen will appear to configure more settings. Here's what can be set up:
    

   • Promise time interval: the time in which your capacity is calculated. Based on this interval, future promise times are predicted after each interval (ex. 10 minutes)

   • Capacity treshold: number of Orders needed to calculate the average preparation time for the promise time interval

   • Average preparation time: average preparation time of your orders. Edit the preparation time inside CMS
     

6. Remember to save your changes - click on the Save button in the top-right corner of the page. Now it's done!

What do my Customers see - ordering flow

Once enabled, the Capacity Management will be displayed for the following Order Types:

• Dine-in Pickup
• Takeout
• Delivery

Here's what happens when your Customer orders something:

1. After selecting a corresponding Order Type (let's take a look at Takeout), the Customer arrives to the ordering page with the menu that's available. The default Order preparation time is ASAP and  we will be using the Capacity Management calculated time to be displayed for your Customer:
   
   
   
2. Once they've selected the Items that they want to Order, they'll get to the checkout page where a summary will appear, along with the time for the Order to be ready. That time will also be taken from the calculated preparation time in the Capacity Management. It will take the time of placing that Order and add the number of minutes calculated in the Order:
   
   
   
3. Once the Order is placed and confirmed, your Customer will also be able to see when it'll be ready. That hour will be set given the current preparation time that was set up:
   

Details on calculations

Currently, the calculations starts when the Order threshold has been reached. So, until the threshold is activated, the time that will be displayed will be the default time that the Store Manager has configured for the Store.

Once this threshold has been reached, the formula starts to make the calculations using the Order's statuses. The calculation engine will use two Order statuses to calculate how much time an Order takes to be prepared:

• Order placed: it will use the time when the Customer has placed the Order

• Order ready: it will use the time when the Order is marked as ready by the Store

With these two different times, the calculation engine will take the time when the Order is ready and it will subtract the time when the Order was placed.

So the formula is: Preparation time = Order-ready - Order placed

The Order-ready prompt will be triggered from the KDS we mentioned before.

Example

Let's see that in practice:

Above, you can see two different rows that show how the calculations are made:

• Promise time is the current time that we have configured for the current time interval. For example, the preparation time that will be displayed for the Customer from 9:00 AM to 9:15 AM will be 5 minutes.

• Actual prep time is the time that it has been calculated by the calculation engine. If the promise time matches the actual prep time, it means that the kitchen in running smoothly.

If we check the interval from 9:15 to 9:30, we can see that the promise time and the actual prep time is different. This means that the Orders that have been prepared during this time interval on average have taken 7 minutes to be prepared. To the Customer, we will be displaying 5 minutes until this time interval has finished.

Once that the time reaches 9:30, we will update the preparation time displayed for the Customer to 7 minutes when they try to request an Order starting from 9.30. This will show the status of the kitchen at that time.

So, the preparation time will be getting updated in the different time intervals continuously. Thanks to that, the capacity of the kitchen will be up to date all the time.