OPOS Standard Opens Up The World Of Customer Pole Displays

As often happens, the major advantages of a technological advance are discovered when it is applied to the practical goal. IEE of Van Nuys, CA was convinced early in the development of OPOS that the open system standard would greatly benefit retailers. IEE decided to actively support the Association for Retail Standards (ARTS) as it attempted to administer and implement the standard (developed by Microsoft, NCR, Epson, PSI and others).

The ARTS standard, OPOS, is an acronym for object linking and embedding (OLE) for retail POS. OPOS defines an architecture for Win32-based POS device access and defines a set of POS device interfaces to support a range of POS solutions in retail cash-register systems. It was not apparent at the time how much value the implementation of the standard would be in the integration and use of a pole display. Pole displays are often viewed as peripherals of lesser importance to the retailer and relatively less complex to interface.

One Service Object Fits All
As our software designers studied the details of the OPOS standard and constructed the necessary software-system model, two underlying themes emerged. Due to the commonality of our command, sets we were convinced that we could support all of our basic modules with one service object (SO). The SO interfaces only IEE pole displays to a line display interface defined by the OPOS standard. The line display interface is developed by the line display control object, that interfaces to the application software and can drive any service object.

By taking advantage of existing status commands, our SO can readily determine which module is connected. OPOS allows us to offer a "hot swap" of virtually all of our pole displays on the same software interface. This offers the integrator/user access to all of our technologies (VF, LCD, etc), formats (2x20, 4x20, 4x40), and numerous character sizes, automatically.

Improved Functionality Of Pole Displays
The second advantage we discovered was that with an added level of effort in SO design we could support system functionality that was not inherently available in the display modules. This added functionality would provide the retailer with opportunities to easily add a wide range of attention-getting advertising messages. Multiple windows, teletyping, multiple forms of marqueeing and complex scrolling was made available through the SO driver.

We suggest that retailers consider the pole display not as a necessary evil, but as an enhancement to overall transaction speed and as a part time point of purchase (POP) tool. A tool that, through advertising messages, can pay for itself well before the end of its useful life.

Software Available For Service Object
IEE has completed development of a Release 1.3-compliant service object (SO) and will license this proprietary software to our customers free of charge. Early in our OPOS planning it became apparent that we would have to develop a control object (CO) in order to evaluate the operation of our SO. A CO is required for each class of peripheral, line displays, printers, scanners, etc. We have released our CO and source code into the public domain, through our Web site, in order to encourage implementation and refinement of the OPOS standard.

Larry D. Hatch is senior product manager for IEE. IEE manufactures pole displays, keypads and integrated panels. He can be reached at (818) 787-0311 ext. 386 or by e-mail at mall@ieeinc.com