Fire & Stone Bar and Grill

Fire & Stone Bar and Grill is a relatively new national restaurant chain that has seen steady growth since its establishment five years ago. Fire & Stone offers casual dining serving mainstream North American dishes, such as appetizers, chicken, pasta, burgers, and steaks, in addition to a variety of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages.

Fire & Stone National Inc. operates the restaurant chain with Doug Thomas acting as CEO. Doug is pleased with the restaurant chain's recent growth, but customer complaint data indicates that there are growing concerns with the promptness of receiving their food orders. Root cause analysis indicates that with the growth of business, serving staff are spending considerably more time with customers and do not have time to walk their paper-recorded orders back to the kitchen, leading to delays in meals being prepared. Fire & Stone National has a business need to reduce the amount of time taken to get orders from serving staff to the kitchen staff.

The Solution

Order Master is a commercial off the shelf (COTS) software solution used in several retail and food service locations world-wide. Order Master replaces the need to manually write customer orders on a notepad and run them to the kitchen, with service staff instead recording an order on an app running on a tablet computer and sending the order via the Internet to the kitchen staff. The kitchen staff then review the order on their own tablets, prepare the order, and indicate to the server when the order is ready.

The solution is easy to use and highly configurable. A user who is designated as an "Administrator" may set table numbers for the restaurant, profiles for each server, menu items that servers may select on their tablet when taking a customer order, and menu pages that group menu items together for quick look-up.

When taking a customer's order, the server will use the menu pages to quickly jump to the items that the customer is requesting. The server will then add items requested by the customer to their order. At any time, the server may tap the "View Order" button to switch to the Order Screen, where the table's order can be reviewed, revised, or cooking notes can be added. If the order is correct, the server will then tap the "Send to Kitchen" button to send the order to the kitchen. The kitchen has a larger tablet where the kitchen staff review inbound orders. Once the kitchen has prepared the table's order, they will send an alert to the server's tablet indicating that the order is ready to be served.

Order Master Functions

A review of the manual for Order Master app reveals the following functions:

• Create new order;
• Add item to order;
• Remove item from order;
• Add note to item;
• Cancel order;
• Send order to kitchen;
• Acknowledge order pick-up;
• Review new order;
• Alert order is ready;
• Set menu items (Configuration);
• Set menu page categories (Configuration);
• Set server profiles (Configuration); and
• Set tables (Configuration).

Hardware Requirements

The software is hosted by the vendor, so the business does not need to host any software on-site. The user interfaces are delivered via apps that can be installed on tablet computers that connect to the vendor's servers via a wireless Internet connection. Configuration of the software, including setting menu items, menu pages, server profiles, and restaurant tables, is best performed on a desktop computer.

The Project

Pragmatic Solutions, an IT consulting company, has been contracted by Doug Thomas to deliver the solution at Fire & Stone National. Before investing in implementation at each Fire & Stone Bar and Grill nationally, Doug has asked that a pilot be tried at one location to determine requirements and to demonstrate the value of the solution. Pragmatic Solutions deployed a project team to work with one of the more popular Fire & Stone locations and deploy the pilot there.

Unfortunately, the business analyst on the project team has taken a leave of absence, and you must take over for them on the project. The previous BA completed some stakeholder analysis, wrote an incomplete current state description, and has elicited some requirements. You must continue creating deliverables for Strategy Analysis, Requirements Analysis and Design Definition, and Solution Evaluation. Your requirements and designs will be provided to the vendor for configuration of the solution, to Fire & Stone National's IT department for purchasing tablets and hardware, and to Pragmatic Solution's training team who will develop a training program for servers, kitchen staff, and restaurant managers on how to use the new system.