Network
The connection drops
The board stays on screen with what it already has, and says it is offline. Bumps are recorded locally and sync when the connection returns.
Kitchen
The ticket, and nothing in the way of it
A tablet on the pass, or the counter tablet switched into kitchen mode. Tickets arrive when they are fired, laid out to be read at arm’s length.
The board
What is on the screen, and nothing else
Age is what a kitchen actually runs on, so it is large and it counts up.
- Ticket number and order age
- Readable across the pass, without anybody walking up to the screen.
- Items with their quantities
- Two of something reads as two, not as two lines that can be missed.
- Modifiers indented under their item
- “No pickle” belongs to the burger it was added to, and the layout says which.
- Notes as written
- Not summarised, and not truncated at a word boundary that changes the meaning.
- Bump the ticket, or an item at a time
- Whichever suits the station. One large tap either way.
Touch targets are sized for somebody wearing gloves with wet hands. There are no small desktop controls on this screen, because a control that has to be aimed at gets pressed with a knuckle and then gets pressed twice.
Routing
Each item goes to the station that makes it
The espresso bar sees drinks, the grill sees grill, and a ticket that needs both says so.
Stage 1
The order fires
Structurally once per order, which is what makes everything after it countable.
Stage 2
Routing is fixed
Against the menu in force at that moment. Change a station at noon and the ticket already cooking does not rearrange itself.
Stage 3
Boards divide
Each station gets its own screen, or one screen shows the whole kitchen. Both read the same tickets.
Stage 4
Waiting on
A cook can see which other station is holding a ticket up, rather than plating early and letting it sit.
When things go wrong
The four ways a kitchen screen fails, and what happens instead
Process
The screen restarts
It comes back to the same board. Tickets are not held in memory — they are folded from the log, so a restart mid-service loses nothing.
Duplication
The same bump arrives twice
It is recorded once. A reconnect that replays what happened cannot turn one bump into two, so a ticket does not vanish from the board and then reappear.
Ordering
Two screens disagree
They cannot. Tickets are ordered by a single authoritative sequence rather than by device clocks, which are wrong.