Computer Manages Restaurant Workers 381
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."
Re:Error: Need. More. Flair. (Score:2, Informative)
The real website, "Humans not Included", is scary. (Score:5, Informative)
Getting past the blogodreck, the real website of Hyperactive Bob [gohyper.com] 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.
Doesn't matter to me... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I for one... (Score:5, Informative)
As Scotty said in Star Trek 3: "The more complex the plumbing, the easier to clog the drain." Ahh, matey, I welcome our computer overlods for a very different reason.
Re:That's great and all... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, at pizza hut (2 years ago), all we had was a P2-based linux box that had a bunch of old text-only VT100 terminals hooked up to it. There wasn't even one in the kitchen, just a dot-matrix printer which printed up order tickets. The registers weren't touch screen, nor picture based -- they were the aforementioned terminals, with keyboards. The interface was anything but intuitive -- instructions for new employees frequently went something like this "Hit F3, then F7, then c, q, p, and r, then F6, then F3." The learning curve was pretty steep. Oh, and special orders? The only thing you could really do via the computer was (1) add or remove toppings or (2) have different toppings for each half of the pizza. Whenever we needed something really special done (say, someone wanted different ingreedients on each third of the pizza, or someone wanted light sauce), we just walked into the kitchen and told the cook.
There wasn't a single 'ruggedized' piece of equipment to be found. You really could have built the exact same system out of stock late 80s equipment, just like the gp suggested.
Re:Great... (Score:3, Informative)
Burger King, Wendy's and Subway - all make considerable money by offering food that *isn't* handled in a robotic way. Your beliefs are warped by working at McDonalds, which makes its money on absolute conformity and discourages special orders.
Actually - thats not quite correct. McDonald's openly solicts *new* menu and system items from the franchises - both the Quarter Pounder and the McFish came from franchisees. (So did the drive-through window.) What you aren't allowed to do is to change existing menu items.
There should have been little surprise at that outcome - as McDonalds has been 'training' it's customers to behave that way for decades.
Re:I for one... (Score:2, Informative)
So the "bartender" only has to know how much ice (if any) to add and what type of glass is used for each drink
computers already used... (Score:4, Informative)
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?