Comment by calmbonsai
1 day ago
Correct. Unless it's, essentially, a single-step order (black coffee), I'm referring to the "steps to completeness" of any given sub-component of an order--usually specialty drinks or modifications to food prep (heating).
In a truly transparent system, one worker could take the place of another one by knowing which steps of an order have been completed, but that's not how their ticketing system works--nor should it.
In practice, hand-offs are done to other workers only for specialized low-variance duties (register).
Very interesting. I would have intuitively hand-waved the variability of each laborer’s output for those as “within a tolerable amount of time, most of the time” but I see your point that at the busiest times an order for a single, more complex item could cause a significant slowdown in the whole pipeline, especially, as you point out, there is a limited number of staff and workstations.