NX Orders: How Dynamic Lead Times Work
A guide for restaurant owners and managers using NX Online Ordering.
The problem this solves
When a guest orders online, you promise them a ready time — "Ready in 20 minutes." Today, that number is usually one fixed number, set once and left alone. It's right on average, and wrong whenever it matters most:
- During a rush, the kitchen is buried but a new guest still gets the same 20-minute promise. Food runs late, and your staff field "where's my order?" calls.
- During a slow stretch, the same number is needlessly long — guests who'd have ordered see a 30-minute wait and go somewhere else instead.
- A single drink and a 15-item catering order get quoted identically, even though one takes a lot longer to make than the other.
Dynamic Lead Times replaces that one fixed number with a live estimate, recalculated for every order, using signals your kitchen is already producing.
What goes into the number
Think of the quoted ready time as starting from your normal prep time, then being adjusted up or down by a few real, observable things:
| Factor | What it means |
|---|---|
| Your baseline | The prep time you've told us is typical for a normal order at a normal time. |
| Order size | A big order takes longer than a coffee. Orders past a certain size add extra minutes. |
| How busy the kitchen is right now | If a lot of orders are already promised for the same time window, new orders get pushed a bit later instead of over-promising a slot that's already full. |
| How fast the kitchen is actually running | If your kitchen is measurably faster or slower than usual right now, the quote shifts to match — both from what's happening today and from what we've learned about typical pace on that day of the week and time of day. |
| A manager's own adjustment | If you know things are about to get slammed (a private party just walked in, a printer's down), you can add extra minutes yourself — see the companion settings guide. |
Every one of these has a safe floor: if a signal isn't available for some reason, it simply contributes nothing rather than guessing. A quote is a promise to a guest, so it's never allowed to be built on a guess.
You also set guardrails — a minimum and maximum quoted time — so the estimate never promises something unreasonably short or unreasonably long. Once demand is high enough that even the maximum isn't realistic, later pickup times can be offered instead.
"Measuring" mode — how you try this safely
You do not have to trust this on day one. Every online ordering site has two states:
- Measuring only (the starting state) — the system computes what it would have quoted, and records it, but guests keep seeing your existing promise. Nothing changes for guests or staff.
- Enabled — the computed quote is what guests actually see and what drives when the order fires to the kitchen.
While a site is in Measuring only, you're quietly building up a real track record: "if we had turned this on, here's how close our quotes would have been to what the kitchen actually did." That comparison — not a guess, not a demo — is what tells you whether switching to Enabled is a good idea for that location. The settings guide covers where to see that comparison.
It gets smarter over time
The system doesn't just react to what's happening in the last few minutes — it also learns your kitchen's normal rhythm. Over several weeks, it builds a picture of how your kitchen typically runs on, say, a Friday dinner versus a Tuesday lunch, and blends that pattern in alongside what's happening right now. A kitchen that's consistently faster on weekday lunches will start getting credit for that; one that runs behind every Saturday night will start seeing that reflected in the quote before the rush even starts.
This learning uses both your online orders and your in-store (dine-in) orders wherever your kitchen has a screen that tracks ticket timing — the kitchen doesn't run any differently depending on which order channel a ticket came from, so both help build a more complete, more quickly-reliable picture of your kitchen's real pace. (At locations without that kind of kitchen screen, the system still adjusts for how busy the kitchen is, just not for measured cook speed — see the settings guide for what that means for your location specifically.)
Frequently asked questions
Will this change what my guests see right away?
No. A location has to be explicitly switched to Enabled before any guest sees a different promise. Turning the feature on for measuring purposes changes nothing customer-facing.Is it safe if our internet or systems have a hiccup?
Yes. If anything needed to compute a live quote isn't available at the moment a guest checks out, the system falls back to your configured baseline time instead of guessing — checkout is never delayed and a guest is never left without a promise.Does it replace my manager's judgment during a rush?
No — it's a floor, not a ceiling on what you can do. You can still add extra time by hand (surge) or pause new ASAP orders entirely for a few minutes if things get away from you. Scheduled/future orders are unaffected either way.What if we don't have a kitchen display system (KDS)?
The quote still adjusts for order size and how busy the kitchen is. The "measured kitchen speed" part of the picture is what depends on having ticket-timing data from a kitchen screen — without it, that part simply contributes nothing rather than guessing, exactly like any other missing signal.
For how to actually configure and use these settings day to day, see
Take Control of Your Online Orders: Managing the Order Control Center