Kitchens in chain restaurants are designed to run on very low amounts of product in compromising stages of production, i.e. products are kept stable in the freezer and close inventory management is key to keeping the restaurant running.
PDA's equipped with printers, barcode scanners, and temperature probes, running the right software, could greatly speed up inventory efficiency. Ideally, a person would be able to do frequent inventory counts, temperature logs, and product management with this device.
When one was pulling product out of the freezer to thaw, they can scan the barcode on the product's box. The person follows the prompts on the device to pull the appropriate number of items. When a person places the product on a tray to thaw, a barcode sticker with date and product information is automatically printed to stick on the corner of the tray. A color stamp device on the printer would automatically print daydot symbols to follow the daydot system.
When daily inventory counts were to be taken throughout the day, a person would simply scan the barcode on the product and key in the number of products.
Make lists, ordering, inventory reports, product expiration lists, and more would be generated automatically by the computer to efficiently help manage the kitchen.
Periodic temperature logs would be easy with an attached thermometer probe. The device would prompt what product it wanted to measure the temperature of and the employee has but to stick the probe in the product.-- fogfreak, Feb 05 2009halfbakery