Biting off more than we could chew? Digitizing the world's busiest restaurants

With more than 250 restaurants spread across 17 ships serving over 1.7 million guests a year from all over the world a constantly changing menu, Princess Cruises runs one of the largest food operations in the world. It’s bananas!

As a business we are concerned with supply and demand. We must continuously answer the following questions: what dishes should we serve based on region and cruise itinerary (demand) and do we have enough ingredients on hand to create those dishes (demand). We carry over 35,000 ingredients onboard (which we have to pick up in locations across the world) and staff butchers, pastry chefs, baristas, bartenders, and servers to name few.

Our manual system was tedious to use and difficult to manage, resulting in financial losses mainly from waste. The coordination, consolidation, and management needed a more efficient process to bring home the bacon. It was time to wake up and smell the coffee! We were tasked with the unique opportunity to digitize and create a fully integrated system powered by Drupal.

We converted a paper based, manual process into a fully trackable digital system. Our solution can be broken down into many parts, which this talk aims to provide an overview of:

• Menu Management (custom content types and taxonomies)
• Digital Signage (decoupled JS apps)
• Restaurant Menu for guests (etc. - how does each "part" relate to Drupal? This should be Drupal focused)
• Menu and Ticket Printing
• Reservations
• Table Assignment
• Table Side Order
• Meal Counter
• Kitchen Display Systems
• Chef Meal Planning
• Butcher Ticket order System
• Real Time Dashboard with Variance Flags and Triggers

Using a variety of technology:

• Drupal 7 (Migrating to D8)
• Angular
• NodeJS
• CouchDB with PouchDB
• Integrations with 3rd party hardware and software

It was not a piece of cake! Come to our session and we will spill the beans on how we were able to accomplish this digital transformation.