The Capacity Manager is responsible for ensuring that the kitchen can operate at its full potential, avoiding overload, and providing estimates for food preparation.
Based on your current open orders, the Capacity Manager provides an estimated preparation time for new orders coming in. This allows you to maximize your kitchen’s flow while enabling you to give realistic estimates for your guests.
This is especially important for online guests, who can know how long it will take for their order to be ready, before they even place it. Similarly, staff can inform in-house guests about any possible delays, opening the opportunity for the guests to change their order, or consume something else in the meantime.
There is no need to use the Capacity Manager for all of your Menu products, only for those that require significant kitchen time and resources.
How the Capacity Manager works
The Capacity Manager is based on the concept of the Capacity Points. These Points represent the time and effort required to prepare a Menu product.
You define how many Capacity Points your kitchen can handle during a given short period of time, say 5, 10 or 15 minutes, depending on what works best for you. This period of time is the Kitchen Capacity time unit.
You define the Capacity Points value for each product based on the number of Capacity Points per time unit. For example, suppose you run a pizza takeaway with an oven that can cook 10 pizzas in 5 minutes, you define:
Kitchen Capacity time unit = 5 minutes
Capacity Points per 5 minutes = 100
Pizza product Capacity Points = 10
This means that every 5 minutes (the Kitchen Capacity time unit) you can produce 10 pizzas. If you have 20 pizzas in your open orders, and a guest orders another pizza, then the system will inform you that it will take 10 minutes before cooking can begin.
Set up Capacity Management
Make sure that Kitchen Capacity is enabled in the settings.
Navigation bar: Administration > Settings
Page: Configuration
To create an Availability category, follow these steps:
Click Kitchen.
Go to the Kitchen capacity. If you do not see it, make sure that Kitchen capacity is enabled in the settings.
Set the Capacity time unit. For example, 5, for five minutes.
Set the Order limit to limit the number of time units an order can take up.
Set the Effective pickup time. This is the number of Capacity time unit periods that is added to the start preparation time in order to calculate the effective pickup time.
Set the Default capacity per time unit.
If your capacity changes according to the time of day or day of the week, perhaps because of the number of kitchen staff that are working at different times, you can indicate this by clicking the Capacity exceptions button. In the dialog, create Time slots and indicate the Capacity you have during that time.
At this point you have set up Kitchen capacity, but no products are associated with it. To assign Capacity points to a product, you have to update the product itself. Do the following:
Navigation bar: Administration > Menu
Page: Menu
Click the product you wish to modify with Capacity points.
In the panel, set the Capacity points for the Product.
Click Update Product to save your changes.
The product you have edited now has Capacity Points associated with it.