by POS Wizard on February 22, 2006
I just ran into this photo of a order taking terminal in one of those Taco Bell/KFC hybrids, and found it very fascinating. Of course I knew that these terminals exist, but I have never actually seen one.
Customers of this restaurant can enter their order and pay —the terminal accepts cash and credit cards— at this terminal and go to the counter to pick up their food. By using the order terminal this restaurant streamlines their order process, and thereby minimizes waiting times for the customers. Of course, such a process works best for fast food restaurants, where speed is more important than quality.
Can anybody tell me who the manufacturer of this terminal is, and what software it runs?
by POS Wizard on February 10, 2006
Despite big initiatives by the likes of Wal-Mart, Target and the Department of Defense, and a good bit of hype, tracking goods with RFID tags isn’t going to become commonplace anytime soon
, said Sal Iannuzzi, president and CEO of Symbol Technologies.
In time, it will be a very significant market, but whether that happens in ‘07 or ‘08, I don’t know that,
said Iannuzzi. It’s such an embryonic market that it’s not about revenue yet… in some ways you can view it as a startup.
RFID uses radio frequency waves to transfer data between a reader and a tag to identify, track or find a tagged item. (The tracking capability is what has spawned privacy concerns.) Symbol markets both readers and tags.
Technology consultancy Gartner estimates that new license revenues for RFID will total $751 million worldwide by the end of 2006. By 2010, Gartner forecasts worldwide RFID spending to surpass $3 billion. Success will depend on finding popular applications beyond retail distribution centers, analysts say.
Just because bar codes are used extensively in distribution centers does not mean RFID will be,
said Jeff Woods, research vice president at Gartner, in a December 2005 report. Businesses are beginning to discover business value in places where they cannot use bar coding, which will be the force that moves RFID forward.
[Source: eWeek]
by POS Wizard on December 30, 2005
The December holiday season is a very busy period for many retailers. Apple expected a huge request for their iPod line of digital media players, and streamlined the sales process for these devices in the Apple shops.
They reserved a section of the shop for their most popular product, and called it the iPod Express. The iPod Express area has more stock than usually to give the item directly to the customer and uses a 30-inch Cinema Display to advise customers which models were in stock. But the most revolutionary part of the iPod Express is that they take advantage of the Internet savvy audience, and mimic the Internet shopping experience,
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by POS Wizard on November 17, 2005
When I recently visited a restaurant trade show, I noticed that there were just as much companies presenting POS systems as there were stands with on-line reservation systems, while I haven’t seen any reservation system on previous visits. When something new comes up that fast, I immediately suspect a hype.
So when talking to the good ol’ POS dealers, I asked them if they had received customer requests for on-line booking systems and whether their systems includes or can be linked to such a tool. As I already expected and according to my own experiences, no-one had received requests for on-line booking systems from their customers, and therefore none of them had included such a tool in their system. Some POS systems did have a bookings screen, and I even found one system that offers an API to connect external applications to the reservation module.
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by POS Wizard on September 23, 2005
The advising body EPCGlobal has approved the first software standard for RFID labels in the retail sector. This is an important step on the road to replace barcodes on products with a RFID label.
EPCGlobal is a daughter of GS1, a world-wide federation for products and retailers of consumer goods. In December 2004 they agreed on a standard for the information on the RFID label itself and the way this information is communicated between the label and the reader.
The standard software connection makes sure that these data can be processed by many information systems for supporting the merchandise logistics. The hundred companies behind this standard called Application Level Events (ALE) standard, says they successfully finished the first tests in supply-chain software.
by POS Wizard on May 25, 2005
Directly after the presentation of Microsoft’s Windows Embedded for Point Of Service platform, many of the major vendors presented their latest products on the Retail Systems 2005 Conference and Exposition, all for the WEPOS platform. HP announced further co-operation with Agilysys on their rp5000 device, Wincor Nixdorf added WEPOS to their popular BEETLE systems and Star Micronics also passed WEPOS verification with their TSP700 printer. Every major provider is jumping on the WEPOS train, but will the retailers also?
