Feeding time!

Imagine that you own a high-turnover, low-margin business (think fast food chain) and that over the past two years "waste has been cut in half and wait times at the drive-through have been reduced by 25 to 40 seconds per consumer."

This is one of the samples from a new quantiative/qualitative analysis solution covered in today's Washington Post, Vehicle-Profiling Technology Speeds Up Fast Food by Charles Sheehan, AP.

HyperActive Technologies of Pittsburgh has been doing field tests of its predictive analysis system compposed of "rooftop cameras that monitor traffic entering a restaurant's parking lot and drive-through."

It's not enough to know that your restaurant sells 120 burgers during the lunch hour on weekdays. Managers must know during which 20 minutes the kitchen will go into high gear during that hour, and it's always a shifting target, Currie [one of the test site managers] said.

The training is done at each site and currently takes one week (down from months... but a week seems the minimum sample size if you think about it).

Having worked fast food I can only imagine how much less exciting technologies like this will make the job. Ibid for retail.