Personalized Dining Check System for Individual Payment
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Solution Overview
Problem
Patrons, waiters, and kitchen staff at dining establishments face burdensome tasks that disrupt the dining experience and hinder efficiency, including managing orders, payments, and communication between groups, leading to social awkwardness and reduced revenue.
Innovation Solution
A personalized dining system that associates mobile devices with table indicia, enabling automatic calculation and payment of individual shares for ordered food and beverages, facilitating communication between patrons, waiters, and kitchen staff through a computer-implemented method and system that manages personalized dining checks.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If manual payment calculation and bill management is used, then patrons can pay individually, but the process is time-consuming and creates social awkwardness
Solution Approach 1:
The system enables automatic calculation of individual payments by associating mobile devices with table indicia and tracking ordered items. The computer system automatically computes each patron's share based on their ordered items, eliminating the need for manual calculation and reducing social awkwardness while saving time.
2Productivity
If waiters manually manage orders and payments, then personalized service is provided, but waiter workload and errors increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system introduces a computer system as an intermediary between patrons, waiters, and kitchen staff. Mobile devices associate with table indicia to automatically track orders and payments, reducing waiter workload and minimizing errors while maintaining personalized service through automated communication channels.
3Loss of information
If traditional bill presentation is used, then all patrons receive one check, but individual payment tracking is lost
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments the traditional unified bill into individualized payment tracks for each patron by associating mobile devices with table indicia. Each patron's ordered items and payment responsibilities are separately tracked and calculated, enabling individual payment processing while maintaining overall table coordination through the computer system.
Data Source
AI summary
Systems and methods are disclosed for managing personalized dining checks created by individualized check item ownership or payment enabled by associating device and table indicia. One method includes: receiving information identifying the mobile devices of one or more patrons and information identifying a table indicia as a result of associating the mobile devices of the one or more patrons with a table indicia; receiving requests for dining items, transaction amounts for each dining item, and payment preferences associated with each dining item from each of the one or more patrons; determining the amounts owed by each patron, based on the dining items requested by each patron, transaction amounts for each dining item, and the payment preference of each patron for each requested dining item; and outputting the amount owed by each patron to an electronic storage medium or display of the mobile device of each patron.