William delivered my pizza tonight – or did he?
I haven’t ordered pizza online from Dominos in a long time – long enough for me to not know about their patent-pending order tracking application which launched in 2008. After completing my order I was presented the option to track the progress of my order. Being a technologist-web-geek, I couldn’t help but begin wondering about the technical and business aspects of such an application.
My order was processed quickly and progress noted without the need to refresh the browser page. I would argue against the use of Flash for such an application given the limitations on the iPhone and iPad, but otherwise, it seemed to work very well. My order was delivered within about ten minutes of the app informing me it was out for delivery. I did not, however, think to ask the delivery guy if his name really was William.
Transparency is dangerous.
Having been involved in the planning and development of numerous web applications for business, I am always cognizant of the risk when providing increased transparency in business operations. If this tracker is truly real-time, any delay or process failure will immediately be obvious and may adversely affect the brand retention I assume this application was targeting as a business case.
Burden staff or automate?
As soon as I began to mentally walk through such a project, I realized that the increased data input on kitchen staff would be quite a burden. This would require the employee to update ‘the system’ either before or after their role has been completed. This is not only a hardware issue, but has impact on performance, training and information security. Automation can resolve some of those issues with the offset of additional cost and complexity to the implementation, but probably can’t be dismissed due to the inherent problems with updating such a system through manual input.
Input or Average
It could be tempting to simply use work center metrics to establish average times and rather than rely on any data input at those work centers, provide order feedback based on average times for that part of the process.
Fantastic or Fake?
The complexity of rolling out such an initiative enterprise-wide and finding out what decisions were made prompted me to Google a bit (yes, it’s officially a verb now) and I found a rash of skepticism and accusation.
“Anonymous” commented on this blog post on the order tracker that based on the order experience, the application is a complete fraud:
The DPT is a fraud. I ordered a pizza one night and it proceeded briskly through the DPT. After about 15 minutes it was out for delivery; however, after about an hour of being out for delivery I decided to check on my pizza. When I found my phone I had three messages from Dominos stating that they were out of deep dish and could not fill my order. On top of that the guy acted like it was my fault because I was not answering my phone. Why do I need to be accessible by phone when they have DPT. If DPT were legit shouldn’t there be some message to say hey we can’t make your pizza instead of telling me Jeff is putting my pizza in the oven and its out for delivery with Jay? Anonymous @ http://heywelikethis.blogspot.com/
No, not a smoking gun, but for me the glaring failure is an inability for the application to alert the consumer to an issue with their order. No one thought of that? Really? There was also a blog post from a now reformed Diet Coke addict who used Dominos as a soda delivery mechanism and labelled the whole tracker as a fraud because it treated his order like a pizza.
I watched in horror as my order of 10 bottles of diet coke was prepared. Then a few minutes later put in a the oven. I wasn’t sure if I should have called them and told them I didn’t want my diet coke heated up or not. After the diet coke left the oven. It was place in a box. Then it was out for delivery.http://www.ppc.bz/get-money-get-paid/
I hear you, disgruntled carbonated beverage guzzler.
But more importantly, I think Dominos probably knew they were going to sell products that didn’t get baked, so, a little more sensitivity to product types in the application was probably called for. The post comments are easily the most entertaining bit to the whole post, but included among them was a comment by a college student with firsthand order tracker experience:
I used to work at Dominos last year. As a college student, it’s a good gig. I pizza tracker is somewhat legit. When it says it’s being prepped, it actually is. When we knock the item off the prep screen, it updates the computer to the over. The ovens are set for 6 minutes so after that it naturally says being boxed. When the driver clocks the run out on the computer, it updates the pizza tracker again to say that it’s being delivered.Ron @ http://www.ppc.bz/
And there we have it: Perhaps three points of actual data entry and two static values established by standards. I’m assuming the process uses the order entry time to begin prep, though that may not be totally accurate. Updating the order as ‘Prep’ completed starts the ‘Bake’ phase, which is pure timing as is the ‘Quality Check’. Dispatch to the driver is the only other actual point of data input.
The good news:
The pizza was great!
