How to make your cafe efficient and effective with a touchscreen

Today's cafe customers expect prompt efficient service and to do this you need an effective touchscreen cafe system

What touchscreen hardware should I use with my touch screen POS system?

For a cafe I recommend a touchscreen terminal which as the touch screen and the PC as one unit. These terminals are usually fanless, quiet and are resistant to spills

How many touchscreen do I need?

This depends on the volume of your cafe and how you want to manage your preparation areas. First if you have a high volume even if this is just over the lunch period then you may require 2 or more touch screen terminals.

The next questions is how you want to manage your orders.

The order docket approach
With this approach when an order is placed you have various thermal printer located at your preparation aras which print out the order. Your staff place these dockets in order and go about fulfilling the orders. This model has been in use well before touchscreen hardware and touch screen POS systems have been around and people manually wrote orders on a docket or pad.

The order screen approach
Rather than print out a order no a thermal print the orders are shown on a screen in your preparation araas and you store view this and fulfil the order. The benefit of this second approach is that the system can provide alert based on the time the order was placed, it can flash if the order has been waiting for certain perid of time, eveyone including the manager can see what is taking place. Basically this approach although it requires more touchscreen units can make you cafe process more efficient.

If you are a store that gets a rush of morning coffee orders and lunch orders then you need systems to ensure your staff have as much support to ensure they are efficient in their order preparation and management. Customers who have to wait will go down the road or around he corner. SO again the cost may be higher but the benefits may result in happy customers and a happy business owner who is making more money.

So lets exaplin the setup in more details to make you cafe more efficient with a touchscreen.

On the front counter you wil lhave 2 touchscreen terminals with your touch screen POS system.
At your coffee preparation areas you will have another touchscreen where you staff will prepare the orders
At your food preparation areas (1 or mroe loations) you will have another touchscreen.

As the orders are placed they will appear on these other touch screen with informaton on when the order was placed and the priority. YOur staff will be directed by the touch screen system on where to focus their energy. It is the intelligence of the system to direct you staff that will make your cafe more efficient.

For more information on running a cafe and touchscreen POS system stay tuned.