Waiter

Introduction

This App is part of the Restaurant Ordering System, and is designed to work alongside Manager and Kitchen.

Current functionality

Waiter currently only has core functionality and is still in development. However, the current version provides the following functionality:

Login

Restaurants login to the App using the credentials they used to create an account in Manager.

Order management

Waiters can easily see the current state of all their orders, and even how long until the next dish is ready. This unprecedented ease of managing orders will help waiters to provide a better service to their customers.

Ordering process

Waiter covers the entire ordering process, from setting the table number to generating an emailing the bill to the customer. The Waiter is always kept up to date on the status of each ordered item, which synchronises with the Kitchen App. Furthermore, the App uses colours to help communicate the most relevant order items that need the user's attention.

Navigating the menu is as easy as finding a contact on your phone. The App clearly highlights items that have already been ordered, and shows customisations that have been made to dishes.

Discounts

Discounts can be applied to the whole bill or individual items, and can be a percentage or amount deduction. Future versions will also allow easy input of offer codes that the customer may present.

Push notifications

There will be times when the waiter isn't looking at the app, but still wants to be alerted of anything that needs their attention. The user receives notifications of completed dishes, so that they can collect them promptly from the kitchen to provide the highest level of service to their customers.

Known issues

The app has the following known issues:

• scenes do not always refresh their data after the user's action, and may require navigating away from and back to the page;
• unexpected crashes may occur as a result of heavy memory usage, which will be resolved in future iterations;
  
• the Reservations tab currently has no functionality;
  
• fonts may not appear correctly at first throughout the app;
  
• when selecting items to apply discounts to, the list of items is not currently communicated back to the Select Items scene, if the user were to change their mind about the items to cover;
  
• Apply Offer Code currently has no functionality;
  
• Order item's options sometimes appear twice when viewing the menu;
  
• Currency values are not currently truncated to two decimal places.

How to use

If you want to download and explore the App, please submit a pull request and use the following login credentials to view an account with pre-loaded data:
username: tester
password: password

Please note that Waiter has only been designed to work on an iPhone 6 running iOS 8, currently. It will run on other devices running iOS 8, but you may experience multiple layout issues.

Future work

The Restaurant Ordering System is an ongoing project. Now that simple functionality has been implemented, the developer is working on enhancing the experience for Waiters, and to cover less common use cases.