It was decided that to help address all the issues with congestion and waiting time estimation, the existing ticketing system would be modified to connect with a new mobile application which would allow everybody to see the current waiting times at all locations, as well as issue remote tickets to the smart phone application directly. 

Fusion Systems stepped in to do the design and implementation for the new system, which included: 

• A new series of webservices and a backend management system deployed on AWS. 

• Modification of their on-premises ticketing and seating systems to connect with the web services for remote ticketing, reservations and smart waiting time calculations. 

• A new native iOS and Android mobile application which is also connected to the AWS hosted web services to provide restaurant listing with waiting time, account creation and management for reservations as well as simple remote ticket registration. 

 

While keeping the client an active participant in the project's requirements, the project was led and managed by Fusion Systems and implemented in-house by its team of software engineers. 

An initial trial phase was implemented at a few locations, which also saw Fusion Systems assist in gathering KPI data on site. This included hiring and managing teams of people gathering information about the number of cars showing to locations during the day to help build data to see the impact of the release of the new remote ticketing system. 

Meanwhile, the development team had the challenging task of adapting the legacy system for the seating in the restaurants to connect to the new web services to allow the mobile application to communicate with all the restaurants.

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The main difficulty being in reusing the limited embedded devices to avoid the need for expensive replacements due to the number of restaurants. The restrictions of the physical devices required the team to do custom implementations of many features which would have been available directly with newer technology, but this allowed the restaurants to operate with a simple software deployment with no need for physical replacement. This saved money for the client while also making the deployment process for the restaurants very smooth, which was very important considering this would allow more than 400 restaurants to be deployed on the same day, making them all available for use on the mobile application. 

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The data gathered by the team at the locations also helped to build the smart waiting time calculation to allow it to adjust based on time of day and how busy a location was getting. The data gathered allowed us to evaluate the improvements in real waiting times against the estimates once the system was launched. The backend management system built for the system also allowed dynamic adjustments without the need for further deployments. 

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Under guidance from the client for the branding of the new mobile applications, both a native iOS and native Android application were developed at the same time. This allowed the timing of the launch of both applications to be executed at the same time, allowing all customers of the restaurants access to the new remote ticking. Special care was taken into ensuing as large of a support for the types of devices, to make sure that everybody who wanted could get a ticket. This required careful consideration of resource management to support older phone models.