Bartels Franchise Technology

Design research for the technology stack behind the Bartels restaurant franchise: what gets built in each Restaurant, what runs centrally, and why each choice was made rather than the obvious alternative.

Everything here is a working document. Where something is undecided it says so.

Where to start

Context first — it is the glossary, and the rest of the writing leans on its terms (Hub, Restaurant, RBB, Stock, committed state). Fifteen minutes there makes everything else read faster.

Architecture is the high-level design: the shape of the system end to end.

From there the detailed designs go one layer down — the Restaurant Backbone that runs on-premise in each Restaurant, payments, observability, staff performance and the agent pipeline.

The platform choices — cloud tier, mobile framework, cost model — record options weighed and the reasoning behind the pick.

Decision records in docs/adr/ capture individual decisions with their context and consequences, dated and numbered.