Today one of our dealers contacted me, and asked me whether I could send them a benchmark document; they had received this request from ‘‘prospective customer‘. First I wanted to know what kind of data they needed, and the answer was: we want to see how your product performs compared to the Industry Standards (the emphasis is mine). They also send me an example document of such a benchmark.
Of course I was really curious about this report, since in my opinion there is no such thing as an industry standard for Point of Sale systems. The POS market consist of thousands of small local suppliers, and I seriously doubt they can get together to create an industry standard.
The report I received had been written by the Retail Systems Alert Group, and has been sponsored by Microsoft and Oracle. In the introduction I read: Analysis is based on 62 respondents of varying sizes and segments. If I imagine 4 size groups and 6 segments, I get 24 size-segment combinations. This report was made based on 3 samples from each combination, which does not give me the idea of a thoroughly investigated report. Furthermore, if you know that there are thousands of POS systems available on the market you can seriously doubt this benchmark.
I read further and found out that they had analysed which operating systems are currently in use, retailers’ performance and maintainability satisfaction levels with these systems, and how recently new systems have been upgraded or installed. In other words, they had not looked at POS systems at all! They looked at the implementation trajectory and the operating system, but don’t say a word about the actual subject of the benchmark!!!
At they end of the report it gets interesting: they finally look at standards compliance and integration with other technologies. The ‘standards’ included are the ARTS data model, IX-Retail and Unified POS. All these standards have been developed by the National Retail federation/Association for Retail Technology Standards, and are supported only by about 150 vendors, consultants and retail companies. As I said before, the Point Of sale market is too divided to form strong industry standards, and any attempt to do so is bound to be insignificant.
My first feeling was right, this report is crap! It does not help the customer when choosing a POS system and neither does it tell the manufacturer where his product stands in the market.