If you've ever struggled with your point-of-sale (pos) system, you know it can get in the way of serving guests and reaching your revenue goals. It's the primary place where you can create or destroy guest confidence. Because of this, the dependability and capability of your pos system is paramount. A dependable and feature-rich pos system can give you a real edge against your competition, but you need to ensure that it can seamlessly integrate into your current back office technology without needing to make a large up front investment.

The OSSI Point of Sale solution has been designed to give you the edge you need to help you serve your guests more effectively and make you as efficient and profitable as possible. It does this through superior technology, flexible configuration, scalable architecture and superior integration capabilities. With OSSI POS, you can add additional terminals without having to build out expensive infrastructure, enabling data to flow seamlessly from one application to the next. Eliminate downtime worries too, because the software's unmatched offline capabilities allow you to sync up data as soon as your network connection is reestablished.

Streamlining Your Operations

The OSSI Point of Sale solution combines leading hardware with the OSSI POS terminal application to give you unsurpassed reliability along with the tools your staff needs to serve your guests more efficiently. Superior check management and on-floor reporting-along with consistent terminal configuration, pricing and screen setup-all help your staff perform at their very best when serving guests. The OSSI POS solution gives your front-line staff exactly what is needed to provide exceptional guest experiences across your entire organization.

Access the Data You Need, When You Need It

One of the benefits of enterprise-level pos and centralized configuration management is better system reporting, and the breadth of reporting in the OSSI POS solution is what differentiates us from the competition. Get operation-specific, audit-based and guest-centric reporting to address all areas of your operation. With OSSI POS solution capabilities that let you customize reports, you can get to the right information at the right time, faster than ever before, and ensure that you are seeing consistent numbers across the entire operation.

OSSI POS Generic Authorization

The OSSI POS Generic authorization feature can be used to allow customers to charge purchases to an internal charge account, either prepaid or with a credit limit established. The account balance is available at the point of sale, and a complete account history is available from the back office system. In addition, account activity can be exported to a third party system - such as a payroll system - to allow for account balance deductions.

Bottom line Benefits

Through award-winning back office and front-of-house feature sets, OSSI POS drives profitability in your mission-critical operations. Real-time reporting helps you react better to immediate operational needs, review guest spending patterns, capitalize on revenue opportunities, cut costs and plan better for the future. OSSI POS enables you to better meet guest needs, increase guest spending and expand your internal capabilities in ways you may never have thought possible. The OSSI POS solution gives you the consistent, high-level results you need to remain successful. With a track record of providing award-winning capabilities and new features that drive better company performance, OSSI POS sets the standard.

Top 12 Trend Features

1. Labor management: The top two cost centers in any restaurant environment are labor and food. It comes as no surprise that restaurant operators identified labor management as the second most important feature of their POS systems (right behind accounting/financials). As a result, we are investing in improved labor functionality. Our new labor scheduler enables restaurant owners to quickly coordinate staffing. It includes a visual on-screen interface with labor costs and is integrated with the company's POS solution.

2. Robust payment security: Once a back-burner issue, payment security and PCI Compliance have moved beyond merely being important to being essential. As a result, we are pushing hard to develop new payment applications or modify current ones to be in accordance with the Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS, the program formerly managed by Visa known as Payment Application Best Practices or PABP). The goal of PA-DSS is to help software vendors and others develop secure payment applications that do not store prohibited data.

3. Integration: Increased security requirements are accelerating the trend towards integration. Vendors concede that, when operators desire a complete system refresh, a single-source, fully-integrated solution is generally the only type of purchase now considered. As such, we are investing heavily in integration. Our POS solution is equipped with a SQL database that will help address the growing demand for integration into third-party applications.

4. Centralization: We identify a steady, ongoing trend to expand centrally hosted applications to include fully functional back office products and management tools. We enable restaurant operators to centrally manage in-store data in real-time, allowing them to measure business results more quickly and efficiently.

5. Virtualization: Virtual applications will help larger operators reduce the footprint of their server farms. For smaller operators, the ability to consolidate all of their in-store systems onto a single piece of hardware will allow them to reduce the number of PCs and/or servers they support and maintain. For multi-unit operators, the combination of a virtualized server farm with an enterprise POS system deployment eliminates the in-store server requirement entirely and allows system consolidation above the store.

6. The expansion of self service: We note that the combination of advanced technology with operator and consumer awareness will create a growing trend toward self-service solutions. While kiosk implementations have the potential to boost sales and streamline operations in many quick-service and fast-casual environments, the definition of self-service will to continue to expand beyond kiosks to include online ordering and mobility. Likewise, Internet-based and mobile ordering (whether by SMS messaging or mobile web) will continue to grow.

7. Mobile Marketing: New forms of marketing are expected to become widespread and require integration. The continuation of this trend will likely see targeted offers or coupons sent to guests' cell phones or PDAs, requiring redemption at the point of sale. We are working towards a solution that enables recognition of e-coupon barcodes at the POS and a strong consumer drive toward mobile technology and online ordering.

8. Conversational Ordering: We expect conversational ordering to grow in importance. This technology offers the ability to allow the associate at the POS to quickly and accurately take an order in whichever sequence the customer prefers. Most POS systems currently present an order flow that the associate must follow. Conversational ordering allows the associate to press the menu items in any order and has intelligence to manage the order completion properly (for example, disallowing completion of the order if a required drink selection is missing from a combo meal).

9. Business Intelligence: We identify business intelligence functionality as a core area of importance, focusing on functionality that enables operators to quickly identify industry trends, predict guest patterns, improve business processes and turn predictive analysis into data-based business decisions. Should the economy continue to trend downward, BI will become increasingly essential to successful hospitality operations. Our solution consolidates data across disparate systems and multiple geographic locations into a single, integrated source for comprehensive reporting, auditing and analysis.

10. Digital Menu Boards: The use of digital menu boards in quick-service environments is expected to expand, requiring integration with the POS to maintain pricing integrity and support different day-part menus. Nutritional information legislation may have an impact on implementation rates; if operators are required to post this information, digital menu boards could prove the most cost-effective method for providing it.

11. CRM & Loyalty: Going into 2008, most restaurant operators did not have a loyalty program, quick-service chief among them. In fact, only 36 percent of all restaurants offered loyalty programs (down slightly from 39 percent in 2007). The economy has changed the game when it comes to loyalty, however, as vendors are reporting a marked increase in interest from restaurant operators. Operators are looking for ways to extend loyalty functionality beyond the point of sale into more sophisticated CRM programs. To deliver on this need, we are rolling out enhancements to their loyalty offerings. We have built our own loyalty application with integration to the our POS application. The integration is built using service-oriented architecture (SOA).

12. Tableside ordering & paymnet: Mobility in the form of table side ordering and payment continues to have significant application in reducing human error, improving efficiency, and boosting payment security. What's more, in light of current economic conditions, restaurant operators are looking at tableside solutions as a way to up-sell products. We are focusing completely on features and functions of the mobile POS that increase sales and reduce inefficiency.