Setting up KDS stations

A kitchen display that shows every item to every cook is a printer with a screensaver. It removes the paper jams and keeps the ticket times, because the work of a KDS is not displaying orders — it is showing each station only what that station has to make.

Start from how the kitchen already works

Stations should follow your physical line, not a template. If a cook cannot see a screen from where they stand, that screen is not their station regardless of what it is called in the configuration.

The most common split in a small kitchen is hot and cold. Larger lines separate grill, fry, saute and cold, and add a dedicated expo view. A pizza operation might split make and oven. There is no correct number; there is the number that matches the positions people actually occupy during a rush.

What each screen should show

• ✓A station screen: only that station's items, with ticket age and any modifiers that change the preparation.
• ✓An expo screen: the whole ticket, with each station's progress, so the person assembling knows what is still outstanding.
• ✓A pass or window screen, if you have one: what is ready and where it is going.

The expo view is the one operators most often skip and most often add later. Without it, someone has to hold the state of every partially complete ticket in their head, which is exactly the job a screen is good at and a person is not.

Where routing goes wrong

• ✓Too many stations for the size of the team. If one cook is working three stations, three screens is three places to look rather than a routed workflow.
• ✓Items routed to the wrong station. A single mis-routed popular item quietly unbalances the whole line, and it is easy to miss because everything still appears somewhere.
• ✓No expo view. Assembly becomes the bottleneck even when every station is keeping up.
• ✓Modifiers that do not travel. A preparation-changing modifier must appear on the station making the item; if it only shows on expo, it is discovered too late.
• ✓Screens positioned for the installer rather than the cook. If reading it means turning away from the pass, it will be read less often than it should be.

Adding screens without adding cost

Routing tends to be under-configured when every screen is a purchase decision. If a station display means buying proprietary kitchen hardware, kitchens compromise on layout to control cost, and the compromise usually lands on skipping expo.

Opero's KDS runs on tablets you already own, or a television with an inexpensive streaming stick, and pricing is per location with unlimited devices. Adding an expo screen or splitting the cold station costs the hardware and nothing else, which means you can adjust the routing to match the line rather than the other way round.