Intelligent Order Sequencing

Reduce waste and improve customer wait times with intelligent, scalable order sequencing

Stores, restaurants, and cafes have thrived on in-store purchases and orders for decades, but things have changed with the advent of mobile ordering.

While it’s no small secret that the 2020 outbreak of COVID-19 has pushed the mobile ordering envelope even further, Forbes previously predicted online and mobile-based delivery orders would grow from $35 billion to $365 billion by 2030.

With this rapid growth, especially over recent years, organizations are finding new challenges surrounding scaling out mobile ordering platforms. The combination of traditional in-store purchases, drive-thru orders, 1st party mobile app orders, 3rd party mobile app orders (such as through Grubhub, UberEats, Instacart, etc.), and web orders have made it difficult to optimize order production to account for growth in non-traditional channels.

These challenges have led to increased waste from mobile orders waiting too long to be collected and thus need remaking, and lengthier in-store wait times for customers whose orders are placed after online or mobile orders.

Intelligent Order Sequencing solves these challenges by reducing or eliminating waste and shortening customer wait times through better order production prioritization. Reducing waste and wait times helps drive the bottom line by reducing the cost of goods sold and enabling a greater sales volume, plus helps support a better customer experience.

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Benefits

Reduce waste

Improve customer experiences

Increase sales revenue

man takes order ticket at cafe grill

Reduce waste with more timely production

Waste can be a top cost factor for organizations that serve orders that can go bad if not promptly consumed, such as coffee, hot meals, and cold or frozen foods. While producing timely orders wasn’t much of a challenge when virtually all orders came via the drive-thru or in-store counter, adding mobile and web ordering to the mix has created scalability challenges.

As more and more orders come in via third party delivery apps, not to mention the store, café, or restaurant’s app, challenges around how to prioritize order production continue to grow and compound. How do you determine when to make a mobile order? Do you enter it into the production queue as soon as it’s entered? If so, what happens when the customer is 30 minutes away and the order gets cold before they collect it? The order will need to be remade, leading to costly waste.

Intelligent Order Sequencing helps solve this challenge by leveraging location and travel time data to accurately determine the estimated time of arrivals (ETAs) for customers depending on their order type. Knowing customer ETAs enables the solution to intelligently queue mobile- and web-based orders for completion as the customer arrives, preventing waste from orders going bad.

man and woman at coffee shop counter

Improving customer experiences with reduced wait times

While organizations may attempt to mitigate waste from early order production by asking the customer to notify them when they’re near the store, what happens when the customer notifies the store or restaurant after already there (or worse, forgets)?

Relying on customer notifications could lead to lengthy delays in order collection or, even worse, delays for other customers as well. Delays lead to a diminished customer experience and could impact sales by extending queue wait times and slowing order entry. For busy coffee shops and quick-serve restaurants, this could result in an overall loss in business if potential customers see a lengthy line and decide to order elsewhere.

Since Intelligent Order Sequencing can leverage customer location data to help schedule order production, it can help organizations produce orders just in time for pickup. Just-in-time production helps reduce customer wait times by striving to ensure rushed mobile order production doesn’t impact in-store orders.

man and woman buying wine

Increase sales revenues

Not only can Intelligent Order Sequencing add to the bottom line by reducing waste, more efficient order production means shorter queues and the ability to enter more orders in less time. Reducing queue times (especially during peak hours) enables cafes and restaurants to enter and process more orders in less time, boosting sales.

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Getting started

Neal Analytics makes it easy to get started with our flexible engagement model. Our flexible engagements make it possible for organizations to quickly gain access to our team of data science, cloud, and IT experts, enabling a rapid time-to-value for Intelligent Order Sequencing solutions.

Contact us to learn more about Intelligent Order Sequencing or to get started.

Resources