Development of an Intelligent Automated Eatery House System

Abstract

The development of an intelligent automated eatery house system is the focus of this research work. The challenges faced by the fast food restaurant operators (eatery) basically were service dissatisfaction which includes: delay in the presentation of the ordered food, physical presentation of money after eating to the waiters, argument in term of wrong presentation of food against the customer wishes. A traditional eatery outfit has a counter where customer can place their order and then make the payment, thus the needs for an employee to take the order and processing the payment. Labour rates are increasingly high nowadays and it is difficult to find the number of workforces in the middle of the hard-economic situation, hence to solve this problem the design of an Intelligent Automated Eatery House System becomes necessary. The experiment approach was adopted using electronic components. The device was put together in two parts: the transmitting and the receiving modules. The schematic design was developed and simulated using Proteus whereas the hardware was implemented using the printed circuit board. The result from this design brings better applications of technology to the daily operations of the eatery outfits. The self-service fast food restaurant is developed and equipped with a user-friendly touch screen system and software design develops to complete the process at the backend. The functionality of the design was proven, the result during the operation of the device shows that the stress of placing an order in the eatery was reduce, processing and payment making was easy through credit/debit card reader, it also provides the means of monitoring both the staff and the customer transaction by the eatery owners. The discrepancy between the chef and waiter during account reconciliation was negligibly absence. A sizable number of employees were kept at counter thereby reducing the cost of labour. The portability of the device to replace food menu also make the design unique; reduction of queues at the counter due to the speed of execution and number of optimum screens to accommodate the maximum output. It is only the system administrator that has the rights to enter the menu with their current prevailing prices, this solve the problem of price manipulation, were a secured system password to change the menu contents by adding or deleting an item or changing its price is solely with the administrator. The system renders 24 hours for 365 days, because the machine will not be sick or go on vacation. Further design should consider a means of placing order from a distance like home or workplace.