S
system
Guest
I recently spent about 2 months researching POS’s systems for a fairly high volume ($50 - $65k/month) pizza restaurant. The place had been there for 25 years and was still using notepads and a cash register for all orders.
I’m an IT guy by trade but was called in to part time manage and upgrade this place and I was frankly amazed when ANY order made it out of there on time and correct! My wife knew the owner and was more the full time manager who scheduled everything, did payroll, accounting (barely), food costs (again, barely), and supply ordering. How she kept some of that stuff strait I may never know, some serious fuzzy logic involved there…
The cash register keypad template was missing so they had penciled in a mock keypad that included one item button for everything… SuperCombo! When we rung up a pizza, it went under supercombo. Ribs, chicken, fish… supercombo, supercombo, supercombo! So we had no clue what was being sold and what didn’t, just a ‘feel’ from how fast we ran out of certain items. The owner had it setup this way and I wasn’t going to waste my time trying to program a cash register that didn’t even have the original keypad, so since I was there to improve the place I decided that a POS system would be the best way to go to start to get a handle on the operations there.
Figuring out how much hardware we need for the POS system was not very hard to do. There were 5 phone lines and it was not uncommon to have 3 or 4 people taking calls at the same time during the dinner rush. So I opted for 4 order entry stations that were completely touch screen and had to be fast and easy to use.
Even in the time I worked there (a couple evenings per week) I noticed many times that the same people would call in orders, yet we still had to write down their name, phone and address each and every time. People were generally tolerant of this, but it was something that could be easily improved upon to provide a much faster and more modern customer service. So a 4 line caller ID that integrated with the POS system was added to the list.
Running tickets to the prep stations and especially when it came time for delivery guys to get their orders together was usually a debacle. Half the time people couldn’t read or understand the tickets, sometimes they simply read them wrong but didn’t ask and a lot of time was wasted by cooks running around ‘confirming’ orders written on the tickets. Kitchen printers would remove 99% of the confusion here. We had 3 separate prep stations, pizza, fry and subs, so 3 kitchen printers plus a delivery printer was added to the list. As long as they can read English, they should have no troubles figuring out what to make for each order or what should be included on a delivery. At this point I was getting excited about the vision of how streamlined this operation was going to be with these problems fixed by the POS system.
I added a few more ‘must haves’ to the list like:
-Cash drawer and a nice receipt printer
-Software must have 30-60-90 marketing
-I want a rock solid database and the software must be written in a fast executing - high level language like C++. I really didn’t want some cobbled together software that was written in VB or .net that could be unusable after a Microsoft Windows update or patch. This is a serious system and should have some serious software.
-A server PC in the office is needed to maintain everything, run reports, etc. It will also run the database and have an integrated data backup.
-Battery backed power supplies for the server PC and the cash drawer station in case power goes out.
-Employee time clock.
-Delivery mapping with printable maps. (would likely pay for itself in a week with the drivers we had… I’m not sure how they found their way into work half the time!).
-Price had to be under $15k (yea, laugh it up POS guys!)
I then proceeded to lookup, read about and talk with EVERY restaurant POS vendor on the planet. That was a lot of fun! Most of those vendors are apparently used to talking with restaurant owners who’s idea of ‘Windows’ is that clear glass where people can look in and watch the guys flipping pizza dough up in the air! Not very computer savvy people I’m guessing. Then I come along, someone who has been building computers for years, writing software, designing network systems and many of these POS sales guys couldn’t answer 1/2 of the questions I was throwing at them.
I will continue on with my research findings in the next post here, unless someone would rather I not. I’m not going to plug or bash any of the different vendors out there, they all have very different strong and weak points and I have no affiliation with any of them aside from what I actually ended up purchasing for this place.
-Scott
I’m an IT guy by trade but was called in to part time manage and upgrade this place and I was frankly amazed when ANY order made it out of there on time and correct! My wife knew the owner and was more the full time manager who scheduled everything, did payroll, accounting (barely), food costs (again, barely), and supply ordering. How she kept some of that stuff strait I may never know, some serious fuzzy logic involved there…
The cash register keypad template was missing so they had penciled in a mock keypad that included one item button for everything… SuperCombo! When we rung up a pizza, it went under supercombo. Ribs, chicken, fish… supercombo, supercombo, supercombo! So we had no clue what was being sold and what didn’t, just a ‘feel’ from how fast we ran out of certain items. The owner had it setup this way and I wasn’t going to waste my time trying to program a cash register that didn’t even have the original keypad, so since I was there to improve the place I decided that a POS system would be the best way to go to start to get a handle on the operations there.
Figuring out how much hardware we need for the POS system was not very hard to do. There were 5 phone lines and it was not uncommon to have 3 or 4 people taking calls at the same time during the dinner rush. So I opted for 4 order entry stations that were completely touch screen and had to be fast and easy to use.
Even in the time I worked there (a couple evenings per week) I noticed many times that the same people would call in orders, yet we still had to write down their name, phone and address each and every time. People were generally tolerant of this, but it was something that could be easily improved upon to provide a much faster and more modern customer service. So a 4 line caller ID that integrated with the POS system was added to the list.
Running tickets to the prep stations and especially when it came time for delivery guys to get their orders together was usually a debacle. Half the time people couldn’t read or understand the tickets, sometimes they simply read them wrong but didn’t ask and a lot of time was wasted by cooks running around ‘confirming’ orders written on the tickets. Kitchen printers would remove 99% of the confusion here. We had 3 separate prep stations, pizza, fry and subs, so 3 kitchen printers plus a delivery printer was added to the list. As long as they can read English, they should have no troubles figuring out what to make for each order or what should be included on a delivery. At this point I was getting excited about the vision of how streamlined this operation was going to be with these problems fixed by the POS system.
I added a few more ‘must haves’ to the list like:
-Cash drawer and a nice receipt printer
-Software must have 30-60-90 marketing
-I want a rock solid database and the software must be written in a fast executing - high level language like C++. I really didn’t want some cobbled together software that was written in VB or .net that could be unusable after a Microsoft Windows update or patch. This is a serious system and should have some serious software.
-A server PC in the office is needed to maintain everything, run reports, etc. It will also run the database and have an integrated data backup.
-Battery backed power supplies for the server PC and the cash drawer station in case power goes out.
-Employee time clock.
-Delivery mapping with printable maps. (would likely pay for itself in a week with the drivers we had… I’m not sure how they found their way into work half the time!).
-Price had to be under $15k (yea, laugh it up POS guys!)
I then proceeded to lookup, read about and talk with EVERY restaurant POS vendor on the planet. That was a lot of fun! Most of those vendors are apparently used to talking with restaurant owners who’s idea of ‘Windows’ is that clear glass where people can look in and watch the guys flipping pizza dough up in the air! Not very computer savvy people I’m guessing. Then I come along, someone who has been building computers for years, writing software, designing network systems and many of these POS sales guys couldn’t answer 1/2 of the questions I was throwing at them.
I will continue on with my research findings in the next post here, unless someone would rather I not. I’m not going to plug or bash any of the different vendors out there, they all have very different strong and weak points and I have no affiliation with any of them aside from what I actually ended up purchasing for this place.
-Scott
