Product & Process

Vendors

eCatering vendors are mainstream restaurants located within a certain range of railway stations. Some vendors have outlets located within station campuses, while most are a few kilometers away. Many vendors are partnered directly with IRCTC, while many others are available via aggregators(Zoop, Railofy, etc.) partnered with IRCTC.

Delivery Challenge

Because the customer to whom food is to be delivered is in a moving train, the service deals with challenges non-existent in case of traditional home delivery services.

• Train’s arrival time & thus delivery time is subject to change (early arrival, delays, etc.)
• Train’s arrival platform & thus delivery location is subject to change
• The coach positions may not be aligned with the railway platform’s coach labels
• The customer might have switched seats during the journey
• The customer may not be reachable on phone due to network connectivity issues

Cut-offs

Every outlet has a cut-off time set which denotes the duration of time (in minutes) requested by the outlet for preparing and processing orders. The base cut-off time requested by restaurants can be between 15 to 105 minutes.

Cut-offs are then calculated based on the base cutoff as:

• Outlet cutoff value 🠦 x minutes
• Customer order booking cutoff 🠦 x minutes (x + 15 minutes in case of prepaid only outlets)
• Customer cancellation cutoff 🠦 x + 10 minutes
• Customer payment cutoff 🠦 x + 5 minutes

These values are used by the system for various decisions like:

• when a placed order is pushed to vendor partner
• whether an outlet should be listed to the customer
• whether a new order can be placed at the outlet
• whether an order can be cancelled by customer
• whether a customer can pay online for a COD order