Domino’s (and most of its rivals) already offer pizza tracking if you order online, showing when a pizza is being cooked and when it leaves the store. Domino’s now says that during 2015, it will add GPS tracking to its delivery vehicles so you can tell exactly how far away it is.
The planned technology upgrade was announced in Domino’s half-year results, which highlights it as a “significant technology update” planned for the first half of the year. We’re all for tech with pizza, but to be honest once the pizza has left the store, we can normally guess quite accurately when it will arrive. What are your thoughts?
Comments
11 responses to “Domino’s Planning GPS Tracking For Every Pizza”
More likely it’s to track their drivers and make sure they aren’t goofing off.
Well, this at least might add some honesty to their tracking system. Last time we ordered a delivery from them we waited over an hour while their online tracker happily ticked over to ‘Delivered’ just 30 minutes after we ordered.
And actually you can’t always guess accurately how far away your pizza is once it’s left the store. Drivers usually take out more than one order at a time, which means that depending on how far away each delivery is, your order can be sitting in their car for something like 20 minutes.
I used to work at a Dominos store that would defraud the system to get better store figures.
TL;DR: You cannot trust the pizza tracker
After an order is placed (online or over the phone) it turns up on a monitor above the make line, so that the makers can make it, and put it in the oven. At this stage, the pizza is listed as “Making Order” (unless it’s a timed order, which works only slightly differently)
Once the pizza is ready for the oven, it is ‘bumped’ off the make queue. This causes a receipt to be printed out after 6 minutes at the other end of the oven, and also labels the pizza as “Cooking” in the pizza tracker.
After 7 minutes (the 6 from before plus another 1), the pizza reaches the other end of the oven, and it is listed as “Ready In Store” on the pizza tracker.
The next step is for the order to be signed out by a delivery driver, who then leaves the store with no more than Three separate orders. At this stage, the pizza tracker shows “Leaving Store”.
Finally, when the driver returns from the deliver, they sign back in to the store, which causes the order tracker to show “Order Complete”
At my previous dominos store, however…
Orders were bumped off the make queue before they were finished being made, sometimes before they had been started (they had a staff member constantly watching and remembering everything that had been bumped off, so that they wouldn’t forget to make it). This made the “Cooking” and “Ready In Store” Tracking sections inaccurate by sometimes up to 10 minutes.
Next, often before the pizza had come out of the oven, they would sign out the deliveries to drivers. This made the “Leaving the Store” section of the tracker out by sometimes up to 20 minutes.
Finally, they would sign drivers back in to the store before they had returned. This made the “Order Complete” section of the tracker out by sometimes up to 40 minutes. Occasionally a driver would return to sign themself back in, and find that they had already been signed out on a new order.
The reason they did this was so that the statistics being sent to head office would show that everything was running really efficiently, despite the poor management.
According to the system, pizzas were being made on time, and delivered on time, but for some strange reason, delivery drivers were taking huge breaks at the end of the night after their last delivery (from all the time being ‘borrowed’ from fraudulent delivery reporting), and before they went home
Well your story explains my experience in the comment above. You didn’t happen to work at the Aspley store did you? 😛 We order pickup from them these days and they’re great with that, but no way would we trust them with a delivery again.
I worked at a store that is now under new management, so I won’t mention it’s name.
It wasn’t Aspley.
Also: Protip for getting pizzas on time…
If you placed an order for “ASAP” then it will show up at the bottom of the make queue. If you request an order for a specific time, it will suddenly appear at the top of the make queue when it is about 10 minutes from the requested time.
Fresh pizza is best!
Double edged sword.
This is good for the consumer and the franchisee no so good for the driver. I can imagine “why did it take you 5 mins longer at this address” or “Why didn’t you get petrol before your shift”.
If its a company car/bike refilling should be on company time.
Reminds me of the hilarious scene in the book Snowcrash where the delivery driver remembers a shortcut to the delivery address only to be foiled by a new housing estate that had been constructed and tanking the delivery car in a backyard pool. A back-up arrived to retrieve the pizza and deliver on time, before the pizza store would have to make good on its “on time or free” policy.
My local Dominos is right on time. Usually faster than I expected. Incidentally they’ve lifted their game lately. The pizzas are pretty good. Three large last no more than 5 mins after they’ve hit our front door.
My bedroom is at the back of a three story terrace. Usually when the tracker says “Leaving Store” I will go downstairs and wait so I can hear the doorbell, but with this GPS I can be even lazier and just walk downstairs when they turn into my street. Thanks Dominos!
I always figured that the pizza tracker was just a standard how it should be thing, not an actual tracking my pizza thing. At the one that we order from though we always order for a specific time, fifteen minutes after we want it. They’re always fifteen minutes early. Always. And then get mad when you’re not home to get the pizza!
This will increase the time between ordering pizza and putting on pants
I have no doubt this will be a really popular thing for the customers and probably a good safety measure for the drivers, but it’s going to put extra strain on the instore staff (me!). We’ve already increased our belt speed (time it takes for a pizza to cook in the oven) from 7 minutes to 6:30. It doesn’t sound like much but it makes a HUGE strain on those of us that cut to manage the oven, without pizzas burning or falling off the oven. The make staff are constantly being pushed to load faster, and everything in store seems to be way more stressful than it needs to be!