Automated Order Processing Solution for Asian Restaurant Chain

Single platform streamlining order management for faster kitchen operation and impeccable customer service

Client and Business Goals

Our client, a Swedish restaurateur, operates a chain of Asian restaurants scattered across the city. With their business’s growth and increased customer flow, the customer faced the incrementally decreasing operational efficiency which was affecting customer satisfaction. The client floated an idea to create an application optimizing the operation of all six restaurants belonging to the chain. The goal was to automate order management, including acceleration of the notification process for kitchen staff, and thus reduce clients’ waiting time and improve customer service.

To develop and introduce the solution, the customer searched for a tech-savvy team with relevant experience in ERP solutions and a portfolio of projects for HoReCa, able to take customer requests seriously. Our background convinced the client to decide in favor of our company as a contractor for the project.

Solution

Our team built an automated failure-proof system with a classic client-server architecture. The application has access to the databases of all six restaurants of the chain. It extracts the information about the orders made online and offline from the databases, displays it to kitchen staff in real-time and saves them a new database.

Worth mentioning is a smart grouping feature which allows grouping orders of the same dish together which allows the kitchen staff to cook several similar dishes simultaneously and complete orders faster.

As the chain adds new restaurants, the app will allow creating new databases with role-based access and functionality, manage and delete them through the admin panel developed by our engineers.

System Capabilities

Processing of online and offline orders
Displaying orders in real-time
Grouping orders for similar dishes within a certain time interval
Order management through the admin panel
Possibility to add / manage / delete databases

Major Functional Modules

Extracting Module

Extracting orders from the existing MySQL databases with further saving in the new shared Mongo database.

Displaying Module

Visualizing separate orders or a group of them to the kitchen staff on touchscreen monitors just in a few minutes after the receipt.

Admin Panel

Management of restaurant databases and received orders, grouping similar ones within a given time interval.

Challenge

The access to the existing databases was read-only, and the client's critical requirement was not to change their structure. To keep track of the updates (new records, changes etc) in those databases and receive prompt notifications about new orders, we used WebSockets.

To ensure high operability, we implemented separate synchronization of each database and wrote individual SQL requests so that low performing legacy databases do not slow down the new system’s response time.

Tech Stack

React.js
Redux
Socket.io

MongoDB
Node.js
Nginx

AIS Team

1Software Developers

1Project Manager

Customer location: Sweden

Project duration: 1 year

Results

Our team strictly followed the roadmap, and delivered the high-quality ERP-like application in compliance with client’s critical requirements and within the timelines. The developed solution was deployed throughout the restaurant chain, followed by maintenance services in the post-launch period.

The client was totally satisfied with the application working speed and functionality. After some time of active app utilization, the customer pointed out significant improvement of kitchen staff productivity and customer satisfaction increase.