What Actually Causes Drive-Thru Bottlenecks (It’s Rarely the Order Window)
Speed-of-service problems are usually diagnosed at the point they become visible — the window — rather than where they start.
When drive-thru times slip, the order window is the easiest place to look, because that's where the delay becomes visible to a manager watching the lot. But the window is frequently the symptom, not the cause.
Vehicle-journey tracking that measures each stage separately — arrival, order confirmation, prep, and hand-off — usually shows the actual bottleneck sitting upstream, in kitchen prep timing or staffing gaps at a specific station, well before a car ever reaches the window.
This is why Proglint's QSR speed-of-service capability measures the full vehicle journey rather than a single checkpoint: a single average "drive-thru time" metric hides exactly the information a shift manager needs to fix the problem.