Enterprise POS - the challenges and moving forward - Operation Support System

 Agile is new way of running the business. Covid has pushed business to be more agile. In the restaurant business agility come from two important factor. 

1. Operation agility -  defines how fast can you innovate the operation process to meet the every changing environment(i.e. lockdown, customer behaviour change)
2. Digital System agility - if you are running more than 50-60 stores, changing the operation require big retraining and communication. Digital System in place can help to minimise and change can be done fairly quickly such as new business process can be implemented which stores could follow

Above is something what is required for industry but how far we are from achieving it. Operation agility - this is business transformation topic and we will keep this for another post. 

Operations in store is implemented via Point of sales(POS) solutions. Some are enterprise POS ( mostly powered by traditional software houses),  some are SaaS POS (powered by tablet based solution). We will examine the current state for both of offering and how far it fits for Digital system agility. 

SaaS POS- most of provider will focus on Electronic cash register and some has offering in smart kitchen( AKA Kitchen display system). But most of them provides no enterprise finance/ HR integrations capability. Therefore the 50-60 or bigger stores chain are unable to implement such solutions. 

Being SaaS provider - the product roadmap is also based on what provider provides. Even Operation agility is done, it can not put in system and as such - it can not be operationalised. 

We don't see above as negative part of SaaS POS but business model as such- it can not provide the agility to particular chains. 

Enterprise traditional POS- Most of provider sales the software per device. You need to engage a third party System integration( in-house team can be used but finding specific skill set is not easy) to integrate to enterprise finance/HR or other solution. 

This works well for first time integration but when operation decide to change the process- then it can not be implemented as only provider could change the code base. 

Moving forward - Not Point of sales but an Operation Support system is required which can provide agility in Digital system with feature as deploy change in logic in 2-3 days and all the POS is automatically updated. 

A merge of Enterprise POS( which provided a depth of feature and functionality for stores) and Cloud POS( which provides agility in term of new process implemented) is required. 

Merged concept is called Operation Support System - which is agile yet feature rich. 

Diqit(www.diqit.com) provides Operation support system for Small, medium and larger chain restaurants with agility which is required for business to thrive in new economy. Contact us for discussion