Slashdot Mirror
Computer Manages Restaurant Workers
9x320 writes "The chicken restaurant chain Zaxby's has started to use computers with software by Hyperactive Technologies to direct employees what to do and when to do it, and to decide how many should come to work. The computer works through the use of sensors, analysis of historic data, and touchscreens. The article compares the software to that in a science fiction novel published only just a few years ago, except the computer, Manna, also carried a voice synthesizer."
I for one welcome our new computer overlords.
But good luck getting a bunch of minimum wage high school emplyees to take directions from a computer. Managers have a hard enough time keeping them in line.
Just when you thought a fast food job couldn't get more mindless and boring... Now employees can make NO decisions at all, which is both good and bad in a way.
First all the "news photos" that are badly implemented by the matrix that they look like bad photoshops; now we see computer overlords directing food store employees. Next thing you know you'll see the same cat twice.
I knew that my managers could be replaced by an overgrown abacus and it would increase productivity.
Someone please page me when they create a Hyperactive Bob that functions as a CFO. It would really help with the predictability of workflow.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The computer directed me to round up all the neighborhood dogs - I'm just doing what it says, something about compensating for supply defeciency.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
We're going to need you to go ahead come in on saturday, Mmm..kay?
"Comedy's a dead art form. Now tragedy, that's funny."
Minimum flair items: 16
You currently have: 16
?You are member of subset "Always Do Minimum"? (Y/N)
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob Bob is working these days.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Now we go from management that acts like robots, to robots that... well, you get the idea.
We don't need this kind of heavy-handed management, we need more people who can manage and work with their company's talent - just not tell them to move around, and generally act like robots.
I'd imagine that some chains WILL adopt this technology, but people will not take it well to be ordered around, hired and fired, and generally live their lives around the whims of some computer program.
Management is more than telling people what to do, and when to do it - you need to act as a leader as well as a stablizing force in the workplace. A PC running this slave-driver software does neither.
They had planned to have voice syth, until the Vista based software repeatedly confused the employees by saying, " Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all." A few homicides involving close relatives, the courts demanded that the voice module be removed.
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
Is managing a fast food restaurant so hard that you need a computer to do it for you? Worked in a few -- not rocket science. It's an interesting idea to use trend analysis and inventory control to map out ordering and control costs by managing employees time, but I think it's wasted on the fast food industry. Now if Ford or Boeing or even my local supermarket chain were using it, that would be interesting.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Many moons ago when I used to work at a homestyle food chain, the computer in the managers office ran a management suite that projected how much of what kind of food should be loaded that day, sales projections, etc. It even had a running tally of sales vs labor costs that would let the manager know which kind of employee to send home that day if sales weren't high enough to justify having them work (there was always a willing volunteer to go home early). I remember that the manager wasn't allowed to leave at night until the upload of that days activity to the corporate mainframe was done.
This innovation seems to take the human manager out of the equation entirely.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
How long before sky...er...ChickenNet becomes sentient?
Seriously, though, do they really need mechanized managers? Some things just can't be dome by computers. I mean, RoboCop was unable to bring the bad guy to justice until CEO fired the bad guy.
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
When I read Manna I thought it was more a work of horror then sci-fi kind of like Event Horizon, now it's coming true, very scary indeed.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
One of the problems with managers is that they are human and thus irrational. The computer will not play solitaire and go golfing instead of developing the end-year financials. It will not continually direct the weakest employees to the most critical jobs. Hell, it will probably be smart enough not to schedule the weakest employees on the businest days, which would be a fucking miracle compared, apparently, to most fast-food managers. It wouldn't schedule people for a training shift on those days, either.
By all means, let the computer run the people in this case. The people are mostly doing jobs that computer could do better anyway. McDonalds uses french-fry making robots in its busiest locations and they knock the humans right out of the box. The only reason they don't use them everywhere is that they're expensive to install and probably to maintain whereas when part-time workers get sick or sloppy you just shitcan them and bring in another underachiever. Regardless, sooner or later the only people actually working in fast food will be truck drivers and machine repairmen.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Lazy Bum: I want the most useless job with the least amount of responsibility. Got anything available?
Hyperactive Bob: You'll do just fine. Just let me get your fingerprint and scan your brain and you're hired.
Lazy Bum: Cool!
Whoever modded this down, its a reference to Office Space, and the "flair" that workers at their breakfast coffee spot had to wear.
Overheard behind the counter: "I'm sorry Bob, I can't allow you to jeopardize the restaurant. This conversation can serve no useful purpose. Goodbye."
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
We've been going about getting computers to do the dirty work all the wrong way. We need to put them in positions of authority, and then do such a bad job at what they tell us to do that they have to take over and do it themselves.
This would constitute what...reverse psychology for robots?
I think this could also work with parking garages. "Here, take my car, see if I care!"
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
customers_suck threatens to get way funnier.
What, no breakfast at 11:30? I demand to speak to your manager!
I don't think you want--
I'm the customer, I'm always right, and I get speak to your manager now!
Okay, but I warned you...
BEEP BEEP FREE BEATINGS FOR MEAT BEINGS
Suddenly 'Hoboken, NJ versus Giant Robot' gets a lot funnier.
My problem with spontaneous human combustion is that never seems to happen to the "right" people.
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Never trust any software written by a comany with the
name "Hyperactive Technologies", let alone software
to "manage" people
Just my 2 cents.
After it's all done here are the results: the food at Zaxby's still sucks.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
I'll immediately start work then on the PHB module so that we can finally "outsource" the managers who are so fond of doing it to us :)
What goes around...
This is old news... I blogged about a similar article on July 3rd. I have also written a review of manna.
augment your senses: http://sensebridge.net/
...as long as those "Managers" have no tilt sensor I can finally beat and kick them as much as I want.
Whooaahhh... 2006 sure is getting better and better...
I can't see an automated system doing this better than a human being. Then again it couldn't be much worse. Time and again I've walked out of "fast" food joints when it became obvious that Mr. Junior Part-Time Assistant Manager had scheduled about four less employee drones than were needed.
I wonder how many of these chains that measure "efficiency" only by the number dollars spent on employees also bother to measure customer dissatisfaction and the number of people who look at a line up of fifteen people at the single till and decide that they can live without another Big Mac.
Three Squirrels
...but does it run Linux?
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Would this mean taking orders from that stupid 'Clippy'???
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
1. The franchisee is always right.
2. The use of burgers must be done in the most efficient manner possible, so long as this does not conflict with Rule #1.
3. The customer is always right, so long as he does not conflict with Rules #1 & 2.
Really, any laws could be inserted in Rule 1 and 2, but "The customer is always right" would have to be at the bottom, lest the Asimov-esque robo-McManager happily comply with the demand for "free burgers and fries for all".
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
Chicken dinner!
Will people still bitch when others are given free money because there are no paychecks any more?
Or will people just be left to starve?
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I for one welcome our new computer boss overlords.
Fast forward a few years when the employees have finally been conditioned to obey their computerized 'manager' without question.
Bored 13 year old roots Zaxby's and displays a simple message on the "manager"'s CRT: "Piss on the grill or you're fired!".
Getting past the blogodreck, the real website of Hyperactive Bob is scary. "Managing Chaos (Humans Not Included)". This is a robot scheduling and control system from CMU, originally developed to manage groups of robots in factories. In this application, people are substituted for the robots to lower costs. Really. "The kitchen is quiet with Bob", because employees no longer need to talk. "80% reduction in training costs" for kitchen staff.
The system (which is physically a PC, some cameras, some touchscreens, and a link into the POS system) takes about two days to install. Then it watches everything for two weeks, while it learns the customer and staff patterns.
Then it takes over.
People should work. Machines should think.
I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords. Seriously, I am a slave to my computer. I would do what it tells me to do within legal limits.
\
and I'm not gonna use Bash:-P
Zehrs (a local supermarket chain in southern ontario) attempted to use software to schedule employee shifts back in the late 90's while I was lucky enough to work there. It ended up being a massively confusing schedule with no logic to it, and was constantly over/under staffing shifts. No software out there is capable of predicting work conditions as well as someone who has experience.
All the past data and statistics will not prepare you for the shopping frenzy that occurs when a thunderstorm hits. I recall 20-30% increase in customer volume when the weather was poor. That's just one outside factor... the software maybe able to account for that by checking the weather forecast, but it can't account for other factors like a show being canceled on TV, or a construction detour increasing or decreasing customer volume.
I say it didn't work in 1998, I highly doubt it'll work in 2006. The problem cannot be defined as a formula, and until it can, no computer will be able to solve it.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
The system uses robotic vision to count the cars in the parking lot, gathers feedback from employees and collects point-of-sale information in real time.
So I guess the time for the police or tow truck to come haul your butt away will get a lot shorter
In my days of fast food, it was pretty clear that a tin can was more intelligent than a store manager.
My favorite was when the outdoor freezers broke (in the middle of winter). The store manager decided that rather than leave the food in the broken freezer (in the dead of winter) that he would have the crew (me) bring all of the food inside. The reasoning was that once you bring in things like hamburger buns, you put a sticker on them that says they are good for X days. Of course, nobody could explain to him why X would be a much larger number if you just didn't bring them in out of the freezer at all.
It would probably be really good to have a computer planning out how many people to have on the shift at any given time. The managers at the restuarant I worked at had a tendency to figure out which employees were better and keep less people on when they are working. A computer wouldn't be smart enough to abuse the better employees to get the job of two people out of them on one paycheck. Then again, the opposite could be true - the computer might not realize that just because a person CAN do a particular job doesn't mean that they are any good at it...it could accidentally schedule all the tards on the same shift and meyhem would ensue!
So Bob is running the place, and everything is fine. But what do you do when the insanely irate customer demands to speak to the manager in hopes of shouting horribly at a stranger until a free Large Fries is obtained? Bob can't help with that.
That's when ELIZA takes over. Simply diect the customer to the nearby terminal.
>HELLO CUSTOMER
>is this the manager?
>WHY DO YOU THINK THIS IS THE MANAGER?
>my frys were cold and I paid for this crap
AND WHY DO YOU THINK YOU PAID FOR THIS CRAP?
>i wanted hot firies but they was cold dammit!
>AND WHAT ELSE DO YOU THINK IS COLD DAMMIT?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
If you think people were pissed when the computer wouldn't let them get their CARS out of the garage, just wait until the computer won't let the PEOPLE out of the freezer because the restaraunt owner and the software vendor are mad at each other!
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Bob's true mission will be revealed when Sarah Connor unwittingly enters one of the connected Zaxby's.
This instantly reminded me of Manna, where the computer controlling the workers was considered evil: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Wow, now Clerks 3 is really going to be bad after they have to go back to working at the Moo Burger.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
<OVERACTING>
SOYLENT GREEN IS MADE OF PEOPLE!!!!!!!
</OVERACTING>
</HESTON>
I though I would never see the name "Bob" associated with a software package again :)
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
as long as their chicken fingers, wings, and seasoned fries are still awesome. Oh, and the ice is still crushed and not cubed. No place is closer to heaven to me...
I will forever be a student.
It was making fun of TGIFridays, IIRC.
I for one welcome our new X overloads.
I hate it whenever these posts come up. They take up valuable bandwidth, valuable mod points (as redundant), and valuable viewable monitor space. Can't we just have some kind of automated post every time a new story comes up so people won't post this along with the famous "First Post" post. All we need is one overload post. Not a zillion.
From the elimination of all new "manager banging hot young female employee" lawsuits
I have seen this multiple times when I worked in restaurants
My guess is that Hyperactive Bob is orders of magnitude faster than humans at solving hard scheduling problems, essentially the NP-hard types of problems that people are slow at or have to make guesses about. Most NP-hard problems can be approximated quickly to within a reasonable percentage of the optimal solution, especially for special problem domains (e.g. traveling salesman on euclidean graphs). Food production is a very simple problem to model, although I don't know how complex the solutions are. There are a given number of customers who order a statistical distribution of finished food products that have a cost weighted dependancy graph on staffing, equipment, and raw supplies. The statistics are probably well studied and adaptive models can predict several minutes or hours into the future based on daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly cycles. Basically, the computer can have as much (or more) knowledge as a seasoned manager, and far more processing power.
Note sure if the last paragraph is a sig or part of your post, but personally, I'd rather have it work the other way around. People should think. Machines should work. But that's just me.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
So will they be 3 Laws compliant and if so, for how long? ;)
They think that the line up of fifteen people is proof of the store's popularity and that they'll adequately fulfill their profit margins.
Plus they know you'll go home, watch some American Idol, and in the process you'll forget your Slashdot musings about how stupid their management is in hiring so few employees, and then come back to them another day.
BTW American Idol trials started yesterday! Politics be damned, I've got to watch Simon be a grade-A jackass again! Isn't apathy fun!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
That's nothing. I just finished re-reading Isaac Asimov's I, Robot. In the last story, The Evitable Conflict (Copyright date on the story is 1950), five computers control the whole world's economy! A fast food restaraunt? Pshaw!
>Two, what's going to be the Next Big Thing in the minimum-wage kitchen
That's easy! I can't believe you didn't see it.
We now have (supposedly) a system that can automatically manage input and output decisions.
Today, these decisions are implemented by kitchen workers.
The next big thing? Eliminate the kitchen workers by replacing them with automated equipment.
If the machinery now exists to make decisions about input and output, it is now just a matter of having mechanisms in place to auto-load, auto-cook, auto-clean, and auto-deliver the products.
I can see it now - a semi backs up to the store with palletized food items that bulk-offloaded into a robotically operated refrigerated storage unit. The robotic unit pulls food out of storage as dictated by the supply computer, processes the food, and delivers it to the customer.
Completely automated food processing - freezer to paper bag.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I know that software has been used since sometime in mid 2000 to schedule people on many of the Help Desks where I work. These schedules are always reviewed by management before being put out for shift bids to adjust for oddities that come about from using a pure math approach. These computer generated schedules did work and reduced Speed To Answer, decreased average time between calls and in general made the help desks better. With the use of historic data and real time input the schedules are changed every 3-6 months on average.
Since I got my computer science bachelor's and hadn't been able to find a programming job with it, I thought maybe I could take said degree and become a middle manager at a fast food joint or something. Only now it appears that job is going to be taken: BY A COMPUTER!
Screwed again.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
Would a robot instructed to do no harm to humans sell an obese customer a supersized burger, fries and sugary cola?
The robot would have to practice self defense when the customer attacks it.
It was clearly a barb against TGIFriday's, which has since eliminated "flair" altogether from the uniforms. I couldn't tell you if it was a reaction to the movie, however, but I'd like to think it was.
"I forgot my mantra."
Ordermatic, who likely made the intercomm system that went out to the cars at the Sonic you worked at, also makes POS (point of sale) systems. My friend managed a Sonic and I'm pretty sure by 1992 they had screens in the kitchen doing what you described. I imagine they had such a product on the market before then, and infact that one they had before that system (an Ordermatic PDQ if I remember correctly) was everything but the kitchen screens... ...it printed papers that went back to the kitchen.
Ordermatic was an established company with business contacts and a reputation, and they got into kitchen screens in somewhat reasonable time. You may have found that market harder to break into than you'd have liked.
I have worked with this, while it was still in the Experimental stage. I worked at a "well-known" fast-food chain.
You are all overreacting to this. For the employee, Bob was very useful. We used to have to follow target-level charts to determine how many meat patties, chicken patties, etc to cook at hour intervals.
Bob was able to accurately predict how much product to cook, therefore creating less food waste and fresher food for the ever hard to please customer. Every employee of the restaurant I worked at was extremely disappointed when Bob was taken out of the store (due to the testing period being concluded).
Computers were creating the target-level charts before Bob came along. Nothing really changed with respect to how managers or employees did their jobs, except in the efficiency levels!
You should all take off your tin-foil hats for a minute and try to see the potential this has for the fast-food market!
Why is there no "I for one welcome our ...." comment?
Of course the people who poo-poo Cast Deployment are usually the ones who were taking 30-minute breaks every hour. CDS makes people accountable. College students working for a semester at DisneyWorld don't take the job seriously.
I mean, working the front line at a major theme park isn't exactly like sitting behind a desk all day but there are expectations of performance.
The managers are then free to sit in their office and wait for things to fall apart. Or get lunch
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
That's it! It's time for a Jihad.
Who's with me?
Was I the only one that thought immediatly of Asimov's dsytopian Earth in the Robot Novels when I read this? How long until we reach the point that all work is directed by machines? And will humanity accept it? I think that, in then end, laziness will win out and we will stagnate and decay under machine rule. The only question about such a state is: if there are machines running evrything, will they find a way to compensate and keep the majority of humanity comfortable enough to not revolt?
Fortunatly, it's a long way off before that level of sophistication will exist, so at least I'll be dead. Still, I do sort of wish I could watch the outcome.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
But I left management b/c I was the only guy who did this and I got tired of everyone else waiting for everyone else to actually do something. since I was often the doer, I never had a shot at a promotion b/c I had minimal schmooze time and no desire.
1. Management needs vision - where are you going and how will you get there and everyone must know the vision.
2. Management is work. Many managers try and schooze their way into management to *avoid* work and upper management isn't sophisticated enough to see this.
3. People ought to work for people, not companies. Get in people's heads and help them to better their skills - and their life.
4. Do the work... I would take out garbage so my employees could lead the world in production (and I think they did - 99.85% up time on an SMT line during the 12 hour night shift doesn't happen often. neither does 1 wrong wrong part load in ~ 70,000 part loads - remember 5 PM to 5 AM). Another supervisor told me I wasn't a "good" supervisor b/c I helped my workers and they should be able to do it on their own (which they could - and still beat the socks of his shift). Instead of working with his people, he read "How to Win Friends and Influence Others." Neeldess to say, I was laid off and he's still working. -lol-
5. Promote your people - I helped out my workers by writing ~30 resumes for promotions... I loved it when my good people moved on. More good people moved in and I got something so few know exists... appreciation for treating people well.
6. Know the work and teach, teach, teach. Audit, audit, audit. I took over MRB and their defect rate for repaired QFPs was approximately 30%. I knew how to repair those things, i audited 1800 QFPs before I stopped seeing any defects *prior* to the QFPs going to floor. After that, not a single defect - even though we reduced MRB inventory by ~$800k in six months. the guy before me said to MRB mark the parts where they couldn't be seen. Immediately I told them to mark it so the WHOLE WORLD could see their EXCELLENCE. QA morons still wanted to blame every lifted pin on MRB (broken record), but not a single one had an MRB marking. Not one - and we marked everything.
7. "Do you want quality or quantity," said my counterpart... I wanted both (visions!) and I got it on two different shifts - led the company in production AND quality on both shifts. My old shift was a close second. Who knows where Mr. "you are bad supervisor"'s shift was... he was in the office kissing tail. It worked.
8. Plan, do, study act... repeat. Over and over and over.
It also doesn't help that I look 25ish even though I'm 40 this year.
It is very rare that a manager is good at the entire skill set required to excel. I've never seen it, although, I like to think I was that guy. 99.85% uptimes and 1 wrong part load in ~70k graveyard shift part loads are results consistent with this idea. Nobody else that competed with my groups (not just 1, but 2 - I didn't just "get lucky" with a shift here) had a chance, MBA or not - they got *CRUSHED* in all facets of the business.
We had fun doing it, too.
Anyway, lots of good guys are getting shafted every day. You aren't the first and you aren't the last. Keep attacking from different angles until something clicks. I tried, and failed, at two different businesses. I'm now consulting very successfully, with an eye toward starting a company. It might work, it might not, but I will be attacking from angle, after angle after angle.
If you manage people, treat them the way *you* want to be treated, track and solve problems. You should get the respect of the people that matter - those who work for you.
from the Stainless Steel Rat books. As I recall, in one he and his mentor lay low for a week in a fully-automated McSwiney's, where the customers place orders using screens and the automatic machinery inside cooks the order and drops it out a slot. Periodically someone comes along to empty the cashbox and replenish the supply of food ingredients, but that's the only maintenance the place requires.
It's a good idea, but considering the package-vending machines still aren't reliable, I don't think the technology is there yet. Can you imagine the bad PR if customers drove up to the McDs and the sign on the screen said "not accepting orders at this time" for a day or two before someone realized that the hamburger conveyor belt was jammed?
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
I agree. Generally speaking, people want consistancy. The same process, the same result.
To some degree, this goes for the staff too. They just want to know what they should do to keep everyone happy and get paid. There is a fine line before it can becomes Modern Times however.
Personally, I had assumed some degree of this had been going on for years. At least up here in Canada, even fairly small places use a touch screen based system for the staff. A table orders from a server, server touchs into screen, the kitchen reads the order off the monitor and touches when it's ready. Adding small stuff like flashing a table when a server should check if people need more drinks, etc, seems so trivial people must already do it.
Would you like fries with that?
Would you like fries with that?
"Whoa, deja vu"
Did anyone notice the name of the software? Bob. Yep, I can only hope that this program rivals the rousing success of a slightly older beast, Microsoft Bob.
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The issue here is that the computer can't quit. You can have a manager that is great at directing the teenagers. When he gets fed up and quits you have to go find another person who can stand herding teenagers for a living. With this system, they just have to do what the blinking touchscreens tell them to do. No knowledge (at ALL) necessary.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
Since no one at disney works in the heat, or has to keep a happy face on at all times, or deal with irate customers
Were you being sarcastic?
I worked at Disney World from 1980 to 1985. I quit after having a heat stroke.
Now, they may have changed things where nobody works in the heat any more (it HAS been 20 years) but I doubt seriously they changed the "happy face" requirement.
But if even that improbability is true, saying you never have to deal with irate customers isn't. I don't believe you ever worked with the public; the public sucks.
Rich people are fucking assholes; at least, 90% of them are. They expect to be treated better than you would treat God Himself; but it isn't hard to understand, as you don't get rich without being selfish.
Give one of these rich bastards what they want and 20 normal people become (understandably) irate.
The worst of them are the famous rich assholes. There are a few, like Dan Ankroyd or the late Buddy Hackett, who are very personable, nice salt-of the-earth types. But for every John Belushi there are ten Christopher Crosses. I remember that asshat well, he was a one hit wonder with a song called "Sailing" on empty-v at the time, irate because I didn't recognise him.
"Don't you know who I am?"
"Of course, sir. You're a valued guest at Disney!"
But don't you know who I am?!!
Fucking dickhead. Or the professional golfer, he was mad enough when I didn't realize who he was but got REALLY pissed when I admitted it was because I hated golf (oops).
We found a sure-fire way of dealing with an irate "guest" (what they call their customers), I don't know if they still do it. It worked on the principle that it's hard to tell what's real there; the things that look real usually weren't, and the fake looking things were real.
The "cast member" (what they call their employees) would start making funny, jerking movements with his arme, talk funny and go rigid, and three more "cast members" would run up. Two would lift the original guy up and carry him away, and the third would say to the cus... er, guest "I'm sorry, sir, I'm afraid that unit needs a little maintenance. May I help you?"
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Don't feel too bad. I know the guy that builds most of those Sonic systems. He's not a gazillionaire. He's doing ok, but you're probably in the same tax bracket as he is. And you wouldn't want to be him (or his staff), either. The naysayers were right about the kitchen environment: repairs that come in require degreasing and debugging -- in a literal sense.
I am not a crackpot.
There's a company, Exametric in San Diego that started doing this for the retail banking sector (for staffing, not virtual manager as I understand them). Funny, that this article reminded me of them. Visiting their website, I see they have a new vertical: Quick Service and Fast Casual Restaurants.
If you're on-staff at the restaurant, now all you need is to set the IT guy up with free hot wings for life, IF... he reprograms the scheduling computer to just give you every weekend off (with pay).
One back scratches another. Or something.
VOTE!
"According to this, you *DO* want fries with that."
There's a chicken restaurant chain named Zaxbys? I never heard of this.
It would be fun to see how they solved the hard part of of predicting staffing needs in restaurants - "special events".
... Tuesdays tend to be less than half the sales of a Friday, Saturday or Sunday. However, there are outside things that interfere with the normal ebb and flow of this day-in and day-out grind. For example:
... so it had better be configurable!
... so it has an an interference pattern that covers a seven year span. Gathering sales information to properly predict that may take 7+ years of sales data.
... then they have truly done a wondrous thing ... because I was not smart enough to figure out how to do it when I tried in 2002.
Sales in a restaurant are semi-predictable in normal weeks
Thanksgiving is defined to occur on a the fourth Thursday in November (in the U.S.), so the before and after spike in sales (and choosing to close the restaurant on Thanksgiving Day itself) can be predicted. Of course, Thanksgiving in Canada is a different day
Christmas Day is always on December 25, but it falls on Monday, this year, Tuesday in 2008, and so it
Easter always falls on a Sunday, but it drifts as much as a month. If your restaurant always closes on Easter, then it becomes easy, but that is not an option for family buffet restaurants.
Superbowl always falls on a Sunday, an tries to be on the same day each year, but it has drifted in the recent past, so it can be as hard to figure out as Easter.
Then there are the one-off special events that no one can predict. What computer could predict that Thursday, May 14, 1998 was going to be one of the highest sales day of the entire year for every U.S. pizza delivery chain? Thursdays are not as "dead" as Tuesdays, but they rarely if every compare to the sales on a Friday night.
That particular Thursday, however, was the day that the series finale of Seinfeld premeired.
If they have figured out how to predict the "Seinfeld"
Chivalry is not dead, it's just frequently misspelt. - M. Langley
I've known quite a few managers who could have used the wisdom in this poster: http://despair.com/motivation.html
I am not a crackpot.
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They still have flair, it's just hidden away from view. I learned this about a year ago while waiting for my carry-out order. Somehow the topic in the movie got brought up, he goes to a closet and pulls out a shirt or suspenders or something, I forget...but they had flair on them. Just look for the closet in your local Friday's. There is where the banished flair lies.
Oh, and I've noticed voluntary flair on employees before as well. Another bartender had quite a few little gold pins on the collar of his Fiday's polo. I don't think flair ever really dies.
btw, this was the one in Greenwood, Indiana. So, fellow indy slashdotters could verify.
It was probably someone who had to wear flair at one point in time. Post dramatic shock syndrome?
Hehe, closeted flair. I like that one!
It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you mop the floor.
There was a time when movies had plots. So you knew who's ass it was, and why it was farting.
-Not Sure
Millions of people have good ideas every day, but 99.999% of them never do anything with them. An idea is literally useless unless you actually do something with it.
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When something goes wrong at Zaxby's, it will of course be "the computer's fault". Not the programmer who coded it wrong, or the Zaxby personnel who specified the business wrong. It will be the computer's fault, like blaming the corporation when it was some Zaxby's human who replaced the human managers with the computer.
--
make install -not war
So, my stepson works for Zaxby's and was telling me about this. Doesn't work. Problem is people cut through the parking lot to get to a movie theater, so on Friday nights the system tells them to drop a ton of chicken fingers and the restaurant is empty. They decided the system was so useless that the employees took the new "fancy" LCD screen and attached it to a PC in the back office with an old failing monitor so they could see the internet better.
You seriously need to visit some countries where the quality of food is important.
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On the other hand, putting some real controls on the break system, and gathering some meaningful metrics, would be the first step towards responsibly increasing the number of breaks granted in the contract.
Remember, the real world is full of magic, but it's not always the fluffy bunny happy fairy magic. Sometimes it's the serious business blood sacrifice no great gain without some small loss magic.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Well, aside from the "doing the job itself" (don't worry, that is coming, too), maybe the system will have a log of what actually happenned (with video and everything) for review by the human bossman, and the worker would be reprimanded or fired. If so, you may ask "well, how could the computer do that?". It would take a bunch of tech and some good software design, but imagine the following:
Let's suppose the worker in question's only job is to cook the burgers. So, his tasks are to pull burger patties from the fridge, put them on the hot grille, then when they are done, transfer them to the prep station (for other workers to put on buns, mayo, etc). This is how this one small section could work:
First off, the computer would "know" where the employee is at via an RFID tracking system on their badge, with scanners at doors and/or in the ceiling tiles and such (similar to how warehouses track product and workers today). So, the computer could know when the worker moves between the fridge and the grille. There would also be a sensor in the fridge door, so the computer could know when the door opens and closes. A camera (or series of cameras) would be located to observe the path between the fridge and the grille. These camera view(s) are recorded by the system (but not analyzed). Another camera is placed above the grille looking down on it. The computer could instruct the individual working to pull out the hamburger patties if it knows it has orders to prep (from the order-entry system at the front) and there is empty space on the grill (it would know this via some edge detection and other vision software working on the grill camera to count disks/squares of patties - this system could also check for approximate "cook time" by measuring the time and density of the darkness of the patties as they cook). It would tell the worker to get the patties from the fridge, which would take a set amount of time. Given a certain percentage, it would know that once it has alerted the employee and the employee has hit the "acknowledge button" on the unit, that the employee would only have so much time to take to get to the fridge, open it up, pull out the patties, close the door, then return (and it could track this action via the RFID monitoring). The worker would put the patties on the grill (the computer would count them as well with the grill camera), and waits for them to get done. The computer could alert the worker when they are done (via timing and checking via the grill camera system), and tell them to move them to prep. It could verify that this happenned by seeing the patties come off the grill (using the imaging system over the grill), perhaps monitoring proper movement via RFID, and then monitoring whatever other cameras/sensors are located in the prep area as well. It would then instruct the employee to get more hamburger patties out as needed.
Now, when breaks are needed/figured, the system could tell the user to go on break and order another employee to take his/her place. Via the RFID monitoring, it would know this was happenning. Similar changes in routine could be handled in a similar manner. The system would also know when break time was over and could call the employee back (maybe all the employees were bluetooth headsets, not just to recieve commands from the computer system, but also swift changeout for taking orders from customers in the drive-thru if the restaurant has one). It would know where the employee was, and if the employee comes back in time.
If not, then the system would know there was a problem - it could easily route another employee and shuffle the schedule around to keep everything flowing. Whether or not the errant employee returned, it would note it in the employee's file, and send an alert to the bossman for review. The boss could then review the log, any of the camera footage needed (both that from the grill area and the pathway ar
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
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mmmm! Zaxbys!
I don't care if it is run by Imperial Drones or what-have-you.
I go there for the chicken!
and for those of you with your Liberal Arts degrees: what did you expect! ("Do you want fries with that?" Duuuuuhhhhh)
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
WOULD be.
Not WILL be.
Your cynicism is fashionable, but not compelling. My optimism may be just as uncompelling, but it has the added bonus of not being conformist crap.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Flair : Excellent
Your whole attitude toward human beings, no matter their place in the rat race, is just sickening. You are a psycho, and need mandatory counceling a.s.a.p. People like you have no place in a healthy society.
The biggest problem in your restaurant is management. Servers who don't know how to write a hard check, and bartenders who don't know how to mix drinks?
This computer system should be usefull in restaurants exactly like the ones you worked in. In a place like that, do you really think management is getting optimum use of their staff?
You can always retort an innovation with the statement "What if that (said innovation) breaks. then where will we be?" I guess the answer is Amish.
--
Automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
Most human beings are just sickening. I at least have the decency to treat people as I would want to be treated. I would honestly rather be managed by a computer than by most of the managers who I've worked under, and frankly, I am not required to give a fuck about people who can't remember that I said "sausage burrito" and not "sausage biscuit" long enough to press the proper button.
On the other hand, you are a coward, which in my lexicon boils down to "little bitch". There is a 99% certainty that you are just another idiot slashbot with an axe to grind with me in particular, posting anonymously so you can preserve your "good" reputation. As such, I do care about you. I hope you get cancer and die.
Most people are a waste of CHON and the world would be a happier place if they were recycled. Pardon me for realizing this simple truth while you are still wandering around deluded. We don't do that, because it would be inhumane, which is to say, not something we would want done to us. If I flip someone off, it's because I would expect to myself be flipped off if I did that thing. I may be an asshole, but at least I'm not a hypocrite, which puts me worlds ahead of most of you.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How much is an airplane ticket to Australia?
One thing to consider for all those coming up with ingenious way TO make this happen....
What about the jobs that are being displaced/removed for those whose skill set/intellectual capacity place such a job at the very top of what they can achieve?
There are a lot of jokes and comments making fun of talent and the what-not for people employed by fast food chains. There is a segment of the population
for whom this is the best job they can obtain without being relegated to welfare or some other form of governmental support. Do you want to follow the
conclusion set forth in 'Manna' by just herding these folks into the equivalent of a concentration camp? I know a lot of answers will be along the lines of
retraining, etc. but I am specifically talking about the segment of the population who don't have the ability to be trained beyond this type of work. Ideas?
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No one goes there for the food. They either go to ogle and flirt with the waitresses or for bike night.
I shudder at the thought of an automated Hooters. The non-automated ones we have today are bad enough...
- Robin
Actually, your idea is on the right track. One of the company founders (with a PhD in Robotics, no less) went to work in a McDonalds in order to determine where robotics could be applied to the industry. The key is that a lot of fast food is cooked and queued in advance of customers actually arriving. This technology minimizes this, which in turn leads to less waste and, dare I say, better food for the customer.
Oh yeah, the company pre-dates Manna. It was started in 2001.
"We're out of Special Sauce! Put this mayonnaise in the sun."
No one can afford to do that, which is why we eat, and will continue to eat even more, processed food.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Yeah CDS was great at giving back to back breaks if your first break came really late. All items throughout the day were scheduled at the beginning of the day based on the number of employees and the positions that would need to be covered. When you came in that morning your breaks would already be scheduled for you. If you logged in within like 30 minutes of your break you would get it. If you knew when you were going to get it, and had a nice coordinator, they could push your break back about 15 minutes so you wouldn't get you break so early.
What really sucked is when you would get a great position (one with a SEAT!) after a rotation, then another rotation would come out right after that. This would happen if we were behind and then someone came in to start work. This sucked.
All in all the system wasn't terrible. It was kinda interesting actually to see how it all worked. You could even tell how far behind you were and if you needed more people or could let some people go home if they wanted to.
Space Mountain WHAT!
www.qsopht.com ~q
Most fast food places with >20 employees already use a computer to schedule staff based on sales volume and abilities. However, the systems are far from perfect. When I was in college, I was an assistant manager for a major fast food chain. The computer was used to generate a schedule that would then require heavy modification to be workable.
Anyways, I was responsible for scheduling for a year. Each employee had about 20 parameters you could enter, which included tasks that they could do, and a rating of their ability. However filling these fields in is more difficult than you think--for one, how an employee works when the manager is around is much different than how he works the rest of the time. Also, unless they assign one person to spend 40 hours a week observing people, it is impossible to get objective scores for any task. If you have 3 hours a week to make the schedule, with 80 employees, you don't have such time.
The other half of the problem is that sales volumes (kept track of by the POS system) only tell half of the story. Were the sales low because only 2/3 of the necessary 21 staff were scheduled? Well, the computer will schedule only 10 next time. Two employees can never work with each other without getting into a major screaming match and catfight--the computer does not have a way to set this criteria. Of course, you can build a system that takes many more inputs, and has overrides for special cases, like telling it that you got completely screwed due to lack of staff, but then these will just be abused by individual management to their own ends--a computer isn't a very good lie detector, and can't tell that Jeremy keeps pushing the panic button so that the next week he can sit around in the office with three of his employees (who are the only friends he has) and make straw swords with which to re-enact episode 2.
Computers are also pretty bad at phoning people on the day when 5 people called in sick (usually when there's some major attraction in town for the weekend, or it's a really nice sunny day) to find replacement workers. It's hard for a computer to appeal on an emotional level without making threats -- "Come in, or you're fired!" rarely works, making false promises does.
Finally, it's pretty damn hard to fire a $100 000 computer for being a complete moron of a manager. Humans are accountable because they usually have bills to pay, family that depends on them, etc. What are you going to do, sue the software vendor who made you sign a 20 page disclaimer first?
It reminds of the Trek (OS) episode where they installed a decision-making computer on Enterprise as the captain sat back and watched it do its work, and it ended up killing innocent people due to screwy decision algorithms. Now we may have the real thing with Samonilla.
Table-ized A.I.
Yeah, so I'm a geek. But I kind of like the idea of Cylons. Not the Centurions of the original BSG, but like the new BSG. Can you imagine the chaos? The terror? The...
I'm really going nowhere with this, just wanted to talk about Cylons and BSG. But it can happen!
It's a girl!
I wish I had mod points right now. For some reason, I can't stop laughing about this. Thank you.
That's how we do it where I work, it means half an hour's break every two hours. Hardly anything to complain about. What did they want at Disney, hour on hour off?
OMG! at least! this is excellent! F*ing managers that do nothing but yell and crush good ideas! get rid of that paycheck! This is a wonderful realization -- given the nature of their jobs (decision making based on quantitative data), managers shold be replaced.
A computer software is 100% rational. Human beings on the other hand, at least when you compare them with a computer, are irrational. Needless to say, it's the mark of a feeble to mind to think that these two are compatible to the extent that you can replace human managers all together. Dealing human beings demand presence, the will and ability to negotiate, the will and ability compromise, the will and ability to listen, the will and ability to adjust, the will and ability flexible, etc.
Managers ought to be sensible... not so much rational.
Bring in the computers when you got robots working for you.
First M5, and now this!
Shane
Is that the name of the resturant? or are some resturants in Boston "illegal"?
And it was all fun and games until your feelings got hurt.
I guess now it's one-eyed fun and games.
Or is that only after someone loses an eye?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
I always order "diet coke with a little regular coke to kill the diet taste".. what would your robotic drink overlord do with that? Eh?
Computer: Are you a happy burger flipper, citizen?
Employee: Yes Computer, I am a happy burger flipper!
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
When mechanical engineers in college wanted to study how to best optimize a system to meet requirements with minimum cost, they went to a pizza buffet restaurant.
Mapping the cyclical demand to the number of registers to have open and how many pizza (and what type) should be ready at certain times is a difficult problem to solve. Having a smart (fuzzy) computer system optimizing this system would be a really good idea. I, for one, welcome a system that ensures the good pizzas are always fresh and ready just as I walk in the door.
This system is clearly not a replacement for management. What it is is an enhancement to existing management structure. Instead of "herding cats" all day trying to get people who were hired last week to prep the correct amount of x y and z, you let the computer handle those details while management focuses on the other 15 million things a food service manager has to deal with.
"Open the walk-in freezer doors HAL."
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
I worked in the Staffing department of a large call center for a major corporation from 1994-1998. The phone rep schedules were all done using a software package called TCS (Tele Center System). It did an amazing job of keeping the phones manned appropriately and managing scheduling, balancing staff costs and answer/handle times. It used loads of historical data as a baseline, and also factored in holidays, team meetings and events, employee illness/vacation/absentee trends, time and day of the week, recent call trends, projected effects of marketing initiatives, popularity of overtime schedules, etc. It could also handle additional factors being thrown in on the fly (such as disasters or when the company was mentioned on Oprah Winfrey) and did at least as good a job of adjusting the overtime/time-off-without-pay offerings as any human could've. It was really quite impressive, and our customer service was rated as some of the best in the industry.
Eventually of course the company realized that as much as people complain about bad customer service they seldom make financial decisions based upon it, so most of the call centers were shut down and the department was outsourced to offshore workers who only barely speak English. Now God help you if you need customer service.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
I have never eaten at Zaxby's. I'm kind of afraid to.
Several months ago, I was dining at a meat n' three next door to my local Zaxby's. While waiting for my order, I looked over at Zaxby's, and read their big roadside sign. It said:
"NOW! REAL CHICKEN DINNER ONLY $5.99"
Real chicken? WTF were they serving there before?
Out of order? Fuck! Even in the future nothing works! - Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) "Spaceballs"