Kitchen Display System

Every ticket carries the time since it was fired. As it passes your target, it changes colour, so the oldest order is the most visually obvious thing on the screen rather than something a chef has to work out from a stack of paper.

Orders can be bumped when they go out, recalled if something comes back, and the whole board reflects the change instantly on every screen.

Items are routed to the station that makes them, so the grill screen shows grill items and the bar screen shows drinks. A single order can appear in several places at once without anyone re-reading a full ticket to find their three lines.

Because every ticket is timestamped when it is fired and when it is bumped, the KDS accumulates real prep-time data by item and by station.

That turns "the kitchen felt slow on Saturday" into a number you can act on — and shows which items are consistently the bottleneck when the restaurant is full.

Any tablet, laptop or desktop with a browser. Most restaurants mount a cheap tablet or an old monitor with a mini PC at each station. There is no proprietary hardware to buy and no per-screen licence.

Bumped tickets are not gone. A recall brings the last bumped order back to the top of the board, which is what you need when a plate comes back or a runner drops something on the way out.

Without recall, the alternative is a verbal instruction that leaves no record and no timer, and the remake quietly becomes the slowest ticket of the service.

It does not replace expediting. Someone still has to decide that the table’s four mains go out together, and the screen makes that easier rather than automatic.

It also does not fix a menu with wildly uneven cook times. If a dish takes twenty-five minutes and everything around it takes six, the board will show you that clearly and repeatedly, but changing it is a menu decision.