Subway Order Taker

Disclaimer

Please do not email me about this project without reading the disclaimer above.

Subway is a successful chain of sandwich shops. They have more outlets that McDonalds. You go in and they ask you dozens of questions about the sandwich you would like and they custom build it to your specifications. You have to choose between about 6 types of bread. You must choose a combination from about 16 different kinds of meats and cheeses. You have to choose a selection from about 15 types of salad vegetables. Then you get to choose from half a dozen sauces and dressings and finally decide if you want salt and/or pepper.

This process is quite slow and frustrating for both staff and customer since the staff usually speak English as a second language and the shop is noisy. I would guess it takes more time to get the sandwich described than it does to create it. This results in irritating lineups for the customers.

My idea is to put a couple of terminals at the entrance to the shop to let customers optionally describe their own sandwiches. Possibly a staff person with a good command of English could stand at the entrance of the shop and take orders on a tablet computer, or assist people to use tablet computers he lends them. The orders are summarised and displayed at the appropriate time at the appropriate sandwich-making work station.

Advantages

• If customers take their own orders, you don’t have to pay staff to take orders. You get twice the sandwiches out the door per employee per hour.
• If customers take their own orders, they are more likely to get what they want.
• If order taking is computerised, a customer need not describe his favourite sandwich each time, just click the usual.
• You avoid the frustration of staff and customers with poor English not understanding each other.
• The store is quieter.
• The computer can allow customers to create their own sandwich combinations not on the menu. Knowing the ingredients, the computer can custom price them.
• It is easy to expand or change an electronic menu. You don’t need to paint a new sign. You could have top-ten sandwiches — the most popular combos that week. Tired people could than just pick one, or modify it slightly rather making dozens of micro choices. At election time, you could do a sandwich-based straw poll without any extra work from the staff.
• The information gathered helps central keep closer track on what customers are buying.
• Customers can order ahead and pay ahead by cellphone, or order ahead in the line.
• Customers can pre-build their favourite combinations and order them with just a couple of clicks.
• Management keeps an accurate estimate of ingredient inventories and can ask staff to be more or less generous on ingredients being used out of sync with expectation from the electronic orders.

Disadvantages

• Job becomes more boring for staff.
• Some customers will feel it is a cold assembly line, rather than custom-made.
• It only makes sense in busy shops where there are lineups.

Your order taker program is pretty simple. It just asks the same multiple choice questions a staff person would. It might optionally show pictures of the ingredients for people who have trouble with English or tell you a bit more about them — calories, sodium etc.

Get as many friends and relatives to test your program as you can. Don’t give them any instruction. Watch them to see where they hesitate, become confused, frustrated, or make errors. Any problem is your program’s fault You can’t very well fire your customers, no matter how incompetent they are.

The computer programming is not the problem. The problem is selling the program to Subway and getting them to install it in every outlet. You must not just show proof of concept. Otherwise they will just steal your idea and implement it in house. You need a fully polished product, ready to go. This requires not that big a gamble with a stupendous payoff. You might find a franchisee willing to test your product, but then again his franchise agreement may not permit that. Even so, he might be able to help you get a foot in the door at Subway HQ.

Selling the System

It is almost impossible to sell a computer program just with a description of it. It is also almost impossible to even write a spec for such a program without having a prototype no matter how crazily different just to give them something to say — I want that, but I want this different. Management won’t talk or get interested until they see the screen flash.

They are not about to put the balls of the Subway corporation in your grubby little hands. They will want the full source and the right to install it wherever they please. They may want to hire you as a consultant, but they will definitely want their own people taking charge of future development. A smaller chain might want you to do a turnkey, but surely not Subway.

If you can find some competitor to Subway, see if you can frighten each into buying it exclusively just to keep it out of the hands of the competitor.

I would go into a shop and offer anyone there to tell you everything there is to know about making sandwiches. Staff will know far more about how the shop works than the execs ever will. Ask them how to sell and who to sell to. You just have to find one person in one franchise to try the idea for a week or two. Do this first before you do any programming. You need to find out early about show stoppers.

For a prototype, you can run everything on a laptop, single user.

To demonstrate the system, with minimal risk and interruption, with permission, you could just sit outside the shop and take orders, or help customers select their own order from the computer menu with a mouse. You could get fancy and drag food ingredients around to get some visual interest. The order is printed on a piece of paper that the customer then takes into the store and hands to the clerk. You do this to demonstrate a few things: Customers may ignore you if they choose and buy their sandwich the traditional way.

• no language problems. Staff often have accents and/or trouble understanding English.
• accuracy. nothing forgotten or added inadvertently. The customer verifies it before handing it over.
• productivity/profitability is higher. If you can prove this, even very tiny improvements, they will be extremely interested. That tiny boost will mean billions to them.
• customer knows ahead of time the correct total price and has change ready.
• customers who like to dither over their choices or ask what the 6 kinds of bread are don’t hold up a sandwich maker.
• By creating an assembly line, you can specialise with chatty folks manning the computers and dedicated folks managing the vegetables.

The drive-in is reaping a nostalgia benefit. You could use something like this to take orders from a touch pad you operate from the car, or from your Android cellphone. You could even do the Subway thing as a cellphone app. You could even pay for the sandwich and pick it up when it was ready, saving the customer wait time. The sandwich would be ready to go, bypassing the line. Cellphones are sexy right now. Execs might bite just for than reason alone. If Subway will not bite, you could do a generic turnkey pizza ordering system that used cellphone or even a desk phone (but that would be ordering blind).

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