Changing The Focus Of Quick Service POS Software
When focusing on quick service POS, VARs can build a future through service instead of software.
Trends In Quick Service Drive Technology Changes
According to MacWillie, market saturation means fast food restaurants need to find different methods of getting consumers in the door. This saturation creates the need for what he calls managing the market chain.
"Traditionally," he explains, "the quick service market looked at POS solutions in terms of cash management. These solutions were never part of the strategic solution in the stores. Restaurant chains have pushed products and promotions to consumers based on broad demographic definitions, like age and gender. Nowadays, a family can go out to eat and have 10 or 12 choices of fast food restaurants within a short distance of each other."
"New quick service POS solutions allow restaurants to manage the market chain. Details captured by POS systems tell restaurants a lot about how consumers behave. Restaurants know patterns in customer purchasing, what menu combinations they buy, when they eat and how they pay for their purchases. Traditional POS solutions can't really poll the terminals to serve that need, so VARs are needed to install new systems."
How Can Small VARs Keep Up?
"There are two keys to success for smaller VARs," says Glen Carroll, director of indirect sales at ParTech, Inc. (New Hartford, NY). "The first key is to minimize the customer's total cost of ownership, while maximizing the total value of ownership. This means focusing on long-term service and systems integration - helping restaurant management to proactively adopt technology as it changes. VARs need to fill the void that is rapidly growing in the hospitality industry for information systems (IS) staff."
"The second key to success is providing open architecture," Carroll continues. "Small VARs should not limit themselves to any particular part of the enterprise. They need to ensure that they are not doing anything on a proprietary basis. If Microsoft taught us nothing else, we learned that businesses grow stronger by inclusion rather than exclusion. VARs should focus on the movement of the market toward the ActiveStore initiative. (ActiveStore is an industrywide consortium dedicated to creating a plug-and-play environment for store-level applications.) When VARs keep their systems open by integrating with multiple platforms and products, they will maximize their long-term growth potential."
Move Along With The Technology
MacWillie recommends that VARs who want to keep up with the quick service industry should step up their technical proficiency. "Systems are going to get a lot more complex," he says. "Smaller VARs that traditionally have served this market are going to drop by the wayside because of the cost of supporting and training their internal staff and maintaining business. This extra cost will inhibit their ability to move into the next generation of systems."
To avoid this, MacWillie suggests that small VARs make major investments now to be able to manage and understand this technology. "At the same time," he says, "these VARs need to be able to expand. Opportunity exists in the service side of the business. Software will become the leader in the sale over hardware, but service is the real value VARs will provide."