How much should a Kitchen Display System cost?

We find the answer to be a comparison of value gained verses price paid. Generally speaking, the value gained from KDS is improved speed of service, improved productivity, less waste of time and energy, less errors, and surely, greater customer satisfaction. Thus how much is all this worth to a restaurant owner?

Some will pay thousands of dollars to equip their kitchen with an automated order display system based on a large sales volume of the restaurant operation, while many smaller operations will decide to use alternate methods such as printer-based order procedures. In many cases, printer-based order procedures work well enough. The restaurant management must weigh the value of a paper-based system to that of the automated video system, and determine what price they are willing to pay to make this change. When a paper-based system is approaching the end of its useful lifespan in a restaurant, what considerations should restaurant management include to decide if automated video display order handling is the correct choice?

1) Performance. The video display system should be more reliable than a paper-based system. It should offer fail-safe recovery, redundancy, and fault tolerance to environmental events such as power outage, and equipment failures.

2) Features. The video display system should provide the essence of the paper-based system, plus features that are gained by the use of video communications inherently making it a prime means to show its superiority over a paper-based system. All the inefficiencies found in a paper-based system should be solved in your video display system. And, conversely, the video display system should not introduce inefficiencies that were never encountered in the paper-based system. The features found in KDS clearly prove to be superior.

3) Installation. The video display system should provide an opportunity to clear work space of printers, utilize existing networking or cabling when possible, and not introduce any hardship within the work area for any special needs for mounting equipment and/or cabling new network requirements.

4) Price. Ultimately this is where the decision is.

Pricing of KDS products vary greatly, and often times KDS vendors will pitch expensive software, boasting of great software features for prospective restaurant management. At SEC, our hardware can be purchased at prices which are routinely less than any other KDS vendor offerings, but when placed side by side, our products routinely perform the same or better than the equivalent offering by other vendors. Sometimes restaurant owners and restaurant chains (even at the corporate level) believe they purchased unique and powerful KDS specific software and paid a premium price. The same features they were sold on that were costing them thousands of dollars, is offered by SEC for no additional charge in our products, plus many are just plain common features available for KDS for many years. The equivalent hardware actually costs, on average, double the price of SEC products. Now, without laboring the numbers in too much detail, it is easy to see how a restaurant owner could easily overpay for KDS equipment by as much as double the price of exactly the same performance, and possible ten times more in strictly KDS software purchases. You would be better served to look to POS software vendors, who find it a valuable inclusion in their POS store packages to support SEC KDS-specific kitchen automation features.

So then comes along a particular restaurant chain that needs custom software. Shouldn't that cost a bundle? Why? At SEC, in over 14 years, we have sold products for thousands of corporate restaurants, and have not charged a single dime for custom software needed. We believe it is our obligation to supplement our software with any customized look or changes that a qualified large customer finds is important to them. Once again, the same software feature a particular customer could obtain for a large additional customized software charge, is included by SEC in its product offerings for no additional charge. And once again, the smart shopper wins.

So how much should a KDS cost, and how much is this worth to the restaurant owner? Follow a simple guideline - look for value. It is often hard to understand how a kitchen video system software package can cost thousands of dollars, and with annual contracts. This is outrageous!!!. If you encounter this offer, walk away, and be assured you can find better value. Yes, you got yourself some nice features, but you sure paid a bundle for them, when they were offered for much less elsewhere. And as for that hardware equipment. A video controller is essentially a video controller. SEC introduced the first remote video controller, and evidently, most vendors must have found it a smart idea, so they came along with the same remote video technique. To purchase one for large bucks is just plain silly. You may have been told that you are getting la crème de la crème, but essentially, you are getting a video controller, that costs more than it should - since there is nothing out there worth double your money for any performance claims. While there are many varieties of bump bars with flexible key assignments and pretty colors for each key, here also, you do not need to spend twice as much for perceived performance benefits that simply do not exist, .

By now, the reader should be asking him/herself... if SEC products can be purchased for so much less for the same or better quality, how are they still in business? The answer is best presented as a question... If SEC is charging fair value prices for its products, what does this imply other vendors are attempting to do? Perhaps paying a lot more money makes some customers feel as if they got more.

So there you have it. You can pay a lot of money to get good hardware and software, or you can pay much less to get good hardware and software. Your choice is only one of basic common sense. We all shop for value in our personal lives and this should not stop because we are introduced to something new and perhaps unsure of what it should cost.. A KDS is a sure winner in restaurant kitchens, so make it a sure winner in your checkbook also.