Sharp Case Study: Philly's Best

Written by: Sharp Electronics

Philly's Best Turns To Sharp Intelligent Data Enterprise (SIDE) For Streamlined Sales Tracking


Philly’s Best is southern California’s destination for Philadelphia-style cheesesteaks and hoagies. With 23 locations throughout southern California, keeping track of daily sales data was paramount for the growing chain, yet also very time-consuming. To more efficiently track sales data, Philly’s Best turned to Control Business Systems of Rancho Santa Margarita, CA, to install Sharp UP-700 POS terminals in 20 of their locations and worked with Sharp to program each terminal with the Sharp Intelligent Data Enterprise (SIDE) service to more efficiently track daily sales data.

The SIDE service automatically uploads sales data from each store at the end of every day to a secure, easy-to-access web portal where sales managers in the corporate office can access this information at their convenience. Prior to the SIDE integration, a sales manager in the corporate office would manually download sales information for each store daily via modem. A new solution was needed to bring the chain up to par with modern technology options available, and help them consolidate data quicker and easier.
“As their chain started to grow, and continued to grow, Philly’s Best needed a scalable solution to ensure that new stores come online quickly, and that there was minimum amount of downtime in having their information uploaded to the main database,” said Steve Melvin, Sales Manager, Control Business Systems. “Philly’s Best wanted to standardize on SIDE because it would greatly reduce the amount of time spent tracking sales data. So far, the system has performed as expected and we will be demonstrating a Sharp UP-820F hardware upgrade in the next few months.”

SIDE gives multi-store companies a streamlined solution that can meet even the most stringent POS requirements. SIDE combines the reliability of the Sharp embedded POS system at the store level with the freedom of an open platform system at the above-store level, providing managers with the ability to closely track sales data daily without having to estimate or manage archiving.
The Sharp SIDE service brings complete sales data from Sharp’s premiere embedded POS systems onto a web portal for fast and easy end-user access. All sales information is retrieved from the registers daily and uploaded to a 3-dimensional data warehouse where it can be reviewed, exported and manipulated to suit business owners’ needs.

The SIDE service will also enable Philly’s Best to add new features that will help them better track sales and marketing promotions. Control Business Systems can enable each POS unit with a menu key to record individual coupons, and the corporate office can better monitor which coupons are having the most success in attracting customers.

For information about the complete line of Sharp point-of-sale products, contact Sharp Electronics Corporation, Sharp Plaza, Mahwah, N.J. 07495-1163, or call 1-800-BE-SHARP. For online product information, visit Sharp’s Web site at sharpusa.com.