Whether you’re serving five-course meals to customers wearing tuxedos or a home cooked burger and fries to locals, a kitchen display system is a necessity. 

A kitchen display system, or KDS, is a centralized digital ordering system. It streamlines the ordering process by improving communication between staff.

The benefits of a kitchen display system

A KDS eliminates the need for paper tickets. Waitresses no longer scribble orders on a pad and hand deliver the paper to the Kitchen where it’s hung on a wire until the food is served. Modernizing the process is one benefit of a KDS, but there are others, which include: 

• Streamlined communication
• Tracking orders and ensuring fulfillment
• The ability for customers to place orders on online at their own convenience
• Improved organization between FOS and BOS
• Sending orders to multiple stations

The benefits of multi-station ticket routing

The ability to send orders or tickets to multiple stations, like a bar, kitchen, and grill, is one of the biggest benefits of a KDS system. However, not all kitchen order systems offer this feature. 4 Leaf Labs’ Kitchen Display does offer multi-station orders.

What are the advantages to such a feature?

1.) Communication is streamlined

With orders going to different stations, communication between FOS and BOS is streamlined. A waitress doesn’t have to stop at the bar, place the drink order and then head back to the kitchen to communicate the food order. 

Once an order is put into the Kitchen Display system, the ticket details are split and delivered to the necessary people. So, the bartender sees only the drink order and the kitchen staff sees only the food order. 

2.) Order confusion is minimized

Your staff only receives the order details that are relevant to their station, which means there’s no confusion. Staff doesn’t have to interpret a ticket, which means they can get to work on their responsibilities without sifting through each item.

3.) You can design the stations

Every restaurant is different. Kitchen Display gives restaurant owners the ability to customize their stations. Many establishments have a bar and a kitchen station, but you can send orders to an outdoor bar or a dessert station.

You can also set up separate stations for takeout and delivery. With more customers placing mobile orders, you might have a dedicated crew in the back that works solely on to-go orders. If that’s the case, you can set up a separate station so that the team directly receives the orders without interrupting anyone else’s workflow. 

4.) Each station can have its own set of features

You can turn on different features for each of your stations. The takeout crew, for example, likely needs to work quickly to ensure an order is ready for pickup. As a result, you might want to add countdown timers to each order. 

Meanwhile, to help the main kitchen staff prepare meals as requested, you can make modifiers a certain color. When an order comes in, the modification will show up in blue text, for example, so it’s instantly recognized as a change. 

If you’re in the market for a new KDS, Kitchen Display could be the right fit for your restaurant. You can check out our product demo video and pricing on our website.

Summary

The ability to send orders or tickets to multiple stations, like a bar, kitchen, and grill, is one of the biggest benefits of a kitchen display system - and 4 Leab Labs’ Kitchen Display has it.