INTEGRATED RESTAURANT SERVICE USING POS SYSTEM

SHREEJAA T H (17tucs223@skct.edu.in) & VIGNESHWAR S (17tucs248@skct.edu.in)

ABSTRACT

Over the last few years, the evolution of Information Technology is rapidly increasing and
most of the technologies have served Smart Business solutions. These innovative technologies have
a huge impact on the external business environment like Business to the Customer level. Some
studies on these smart technologies in restaurants showcased that several application is already in
use with partial automation. Hence, in order to make an advancement in these technologies and to
reduce the difficulties in organizing and manipulating food order details and billing in the restaurants,
a POS system can be developed which is integrated with several services that are needed in the
restaurant. This system can drastically improve the service efficiency and lower the operating cost
of the restaurant at the same time.

INTRODUCTION

Restaurants are currently looking for employing a technology that will help them to run their
restaurant productively. Managing and dealing with the orders and generating reports for daily
analysis of your restaurant isn't the least bit a simple task. By completing things exactly instead, still,
manual ways fail in comparison to the machine-controlled process of daily restaurant tasks. So, the
entire restaurant operations can be made automated and it can enable the restaurants to broaden their
reach and push their limits. By developing an integrated restaurant ordering system, we can make
these things happen. The integrated restaurant service system is a technology in which the customers
can directly make a food order request to the kitchen staff and they can respond to their request easily.
Once the orders are placed, the bill amount can also be automatically generated easily by integrating
it with another service. This whole system comprises of three major modules, Customer Facing
Display (CFD), Kitchen Display System (KDS) and Point of Sale (POS) Billing System each with
their very own functionalities.
 This paper provides a short introduction to the Integrated Restaurant Service System and
each of its major modules. Besides, explaining the major modules we are also going to provide some
details about the working model which is made using Java Swing and JDBC and then we are going
to discuss the benefits of them over the recent system.

PROPOSED METHOD

In some existing systems, the system uses separate services or technologies for each function
like ordering, billing, etc., so all the modules and services can be grouped together and end up with
an Integrated Restaurant Service System.

The following flow chart explains the different modules that are integrated together into a
single service.

Customer Facing Display

The Customer Facing Display is a technology used in restaurants that are void of waiters and
enables the customer to place self-orders in a mobile or tablet POS handed to them or placed in each
table and it provides two types of services, displays menu book for food ordering and generates the
bill after closing the order and also we can select the mode of payment which we are going to do.
The customers can be able to view the whole digital menu of the restaurant with some additional
information like best seller and Chef’s recommendations.
 The advantages of Customer Facing Displays over the old systems are that the customers
can place and edit their orders of their own and needn’t wait for the waiter to do it. It also allows the
customers to view how the food may look like and also can see the ingredients used and the recipe
preparing methods. It also displays some things like Chef’s recommendations and Bestsellers alike
they are ordering foods online which will give users a very good experience and also it allows the
customers to know the bill amount while they are ordering the foods.

Figure 1 - Customer Facing Display

Kitchen Display Systems

Kitchen display system is a task managing technology in which the foods that are ordered in
a mobile or tablet POS systems directly by the customers in the restaurant table during the CFD phase
are automatically sent to the kitchen and projected on a wide display, so that the kitchen supervisor
can easily manage the orders by distributing the works to different chef’s or cooks. The kitchen
supervisor can either accept or reject an order based on the stock condition. Once the kitchen
supervisor accepts the order, it is automatically added to the pending orders section and once they
are ready to serve, the orders are discarded and added to the finished orders section.

The advantages of the Kitchen Display System over the existing systems are that they reduce
labor effort and the chances of manual error by automating the entire process. The changes in the
order are automatically updated to the Kitchen supervisor as soon as they are requested by the
customer. The management can keep a check on the average time taken for delivering a particular
meal and can make improvements to it. The use of a Kitchen Display System can drastically increase
the food order and service time.
 Figure 2 – Kitchen Display System

POS Billing System

The Point Of Sale Billing is a technology in which the billing can be done in a POS device
instead of doing manual billing and they can be connected to a remote database that contains the food
order details of each table which is added during the CFD phase and can generate the bill based on
it. Once the customers close their order, the bills will be automatically generated and the customers
can pay the bill either through online using the QR codes in the POS device or through the cash
counter by cash.

The customers can generate the bill as soon as they placed the order (The order must be
accepted by the Kitchen supervisor to generate the bill). Since they are not dependent on other
services and only the database is needed to calculate the bill, multiple bills can be generated at the
same time with multiple hardware variants. The restaurant management can generate a daily report
easily from the database and can analyze the order information. The risk of manual bill manipulation
of the employees is done away with.
 Figure 3 – POS Billing System

Design and working of the model:

The front end user interface for all the modules in the working model is developed using
Java Swing and the data that are received as user input are parsed and manipulated in the back end
using Java program and then they are sent (during food ordering) and received (during bill
calculation) to and from the database by connecting them using Java Database Connectivity. But, all
these technologies must work together and needs to create a level of abstraction to provide the best
user experience.

The following flowchart explains the working of our Integrated Restaurant Service System
model.

In this system, the Customer Facing Display accepts orders from the users and they are
brought back and saved into the database by JDBC. Then, the table in the Kitchen Order Display is
updated by adding the placed order to the pending orders list and once they are finished, they can be
added to the finished orders section by using a different query. Each table in the restaurant can have
separate tables in the database to make billing and some other things effective. Once the customer
closes their order, the data can be obtained from the database tables to the POS Billing System and
then the bill can be generated. Since all the modules are integrated, these things work as a whole and
make works easier.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

In most of the restaurant service systems, they have captains or waiters to take the order in a
single POS mobile device and then he sends them to the Kitchen Display System to get the orders
which may look better, but it doesn’t make a huge impact on customers. Instead of doing this, the
Customer Facing Display technology can be introduced by which the customers can directly make
their orders and make an edit on the orders if they want. The manual billing would be inaccurate and
a customer check survey conducted for analyzing manual billing mistakes revealed that the manual
billing was inaccurate 16% of the time and they can be resolved by using a POS system and they can
increase revenue up to 1.5%. The POS systems can provide information on a real-time basis to the
restaurant by the report, so they can quickly spot and react to the problematic areas which are
affecting the restaurant’s profit such as declining orders in peak hours due to stock imbalance,
excessive labor hours in the kitchen, etc.

The Integrated Restaurant Service System can be made to work with a remote server if the
user can’t afford a server. But, if they are internet-based the whole system may shut down, if the
connection goes offline. So, it is better to get a small server to make things reliable. In most of the
old systems, the services are done by separate modules. But to make things better, these services can
be grouped to get a well Integrated Restaurant Service System.

CONCLUSION

In this paper, a comparison is made on some old automation tools used in restaurants
and explained how the proposed system can perform better than the existing system. These
technologies are always evolving and the best thing is that the food industry fetches the utmost edges
out of it. The Point of Sale systems is the biggest evidence in regard to the advancement in the food
business. Thus, by making the proposed system more advanced and efficient by considering all sorts
of restaurant and customer’s needs, it can be able to build an enormous distinction within the food
business than ever before.