Need of Mobile POS for Business

According to the research conducted by CGA Peach on behalf of Zonal, 47% of diners say food is not arrived quickly enough which is the biggest frustration. 24% say their order being noted down incorrectly is their leading bugbear.

Technology providers say that mobile point of sale is the solution for both the problems.

“You are completely taken out the element of writing an order down and having to walk over to a central terminal to enter it manually in to the system”, explains James Cook.

“Effectively this means a customer orders goes through the kitchen or bar in a quarter of the time. It also means that orders are more accurate, because there is less room for human error”.

Having faster and accurate service is not only good for customers but also good for business. “Because hand held ordering devices allow wait staff to spend more time on the floor serving more customers, they allow operators to increase table turns and ticket averages”, says Shannon Arnold. “It also increases wait staff’s efficiency and productivity as they can serve more customers in less time, ultimately reducing labor costs”.

By the elimination of staff dash between tables and fixed terminal hand held devices can improve the working environment, says Cook.

“Health and safety increased because as you don’t have people rushing about and making unnecessary trips to put orders through”.

Taking orders from hand held devices is not new as the usage of PADs has been for years in the hospitality industry. Technology is the advancement that allows consumer mobile devices such as iPADs and windows tablets is been used as a part of EPOS solution.

“Tablet devices are allowing a much more user friendly way of transmitting orders through the kitchen”, explains Cook. “The screens are much bigger and sharper and with small solutions including ours – the tablets can automatically mirror the fixed POS terminal on the bar”.

Tablets based solutions are also affordable and making mPOS systems more accessible to the operators. Clive Consterdine, director of sales and marketing for Zonal, says the trend is growing and driving restaurants to opt for less fixed tills and more mPOS devices.

“In the old days they might have had four fixed terminals and one PDA, but now they will have one fixed till and may be six mobile devices. The cost of the second option is now less than the cost of the first because tablets are relatively cheap,” he says.