Handheld Point of Sales Changing Restaurants

A few years ago in Europe a small restaurant chain made history. The future had arrived when they took their first order and sent it electronically to the kitchen. That simple act forever changed the future of high volume restaurants. Their little experiment was expand to over a dozen restaurants and netted them a 20% increase in revenue within months. The system paid for itself and created profits by decreasing table turn time by delivering orders to the kitchen in the blink of an eye and increasing the amount of time the wait staff could spend with their patrons.

Such a simple and wonderful idea has been slow to catch on. Many restaurants fear the initial cost investments and the technical nightmare of installing software on handheld devices. Several of major restaurant software manufacturers have released handheld versions of their software. Most of these lack the ease of use and installation needed to make them viable. There have even been a few attempting at making software that can recognize handwriting. Although the concept seems sound in practice it is far from easy to master.

Some time ago I was challenged to write a customer Point of Sale Software System for a customer. I spent a long time thinking about hand held PCs and how best to incorporate them into the package. Easy installation and the ability to run on almost any platform became my primary concerns. I soon hit upon a realization that I could create the application with an HTML front end. I had already created three versions of a Point of Sale system we used in house. I had created our Point of Sale System as an Internet application because we perform a lot of on-site service. Being able to access a customer?s bill and update it from right there at their location was a power we desperately needed. It also allowed for easy integration into our supplier network and allowed the owners to access company data from anywhere and since they?re always halfway across the country it solved a lot of problems.

Taking the tools I had already created and using them to construct a Restaurant Point of Sale was fairly easy and straightforward. There were tons of changes and modifications made and features added, but the core functions of selling a product and recording it are the same no matter what you sell. The end result was a Point of Sale Software Application that can be accessed and used on almost any platform system with no special software to install. The benefits to using this kind of model for software development are far too numerous for me to type. I think you can get an idea of the advantages to businesses of any size. Think of just a few of the advantages to a medium or large sized company. For a large chain of restaurants to be able to increase profits by more than 20% is a staggering figure and well worth the paltry hardware and software costs. With an Internet Based Application they can also increase profits by decreasing the time needed to install and manage software across all locations. Imagine being able to update the software for 400 locations instantly. Imagine how much would be saved by not needing to install software for the vast majority of the machines used for Point of Sales. The amount of money a large company could make just by streaming their technology and taking advantage of it is just staggering.

In all of this I forgot to mention the best part. Think about how cool it is to sit down and have a waitress take your order on a handheld. That?s just too cool and I love it. The same great software can also be used as a Kiosk where patrons enter their own order. I can see the day when you sit down in a fast food restaurant and a computer-generated face takes your order and a small robot brings it to the table or it gets dropped from a chute. Not all restaurants would benefit from all technology, but the advantages of hand held ordering are at the bottom line and a lot of restaurants are going to reap in the profits.

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Author Box - ? Ed Duval (2006) Ed Duval is contract writer and software developer for www.AndTechComputers.com and Creator of the HotPotato Restaurant Point of Sale Software System. With over a decade of experience in software development he shares his unique insight on today's point of sale software systems.