Point of Sales and Digital Transformation

Reinier J. Marlissa, General Manager Information Technology Department, Ateria Group

Point of sales (POS) nowadays has a very important role in Food and Beverage industry. Back in the beginning year 2000, legacy POS with that big and bulk machine is only as a sales recorder and provided business owners with sales recap reports and with other basic functionality. These days, POS already growing rapidly as a system that is an important part of digital transformation.

What is Digital Transformation?

As one of the Food and Beverage technologies persons, the definition of digital transformation is the adoption of digital technologies by F&B companies by converting and digitalizing all aspects of services and operations. For this purpose then one of the biggest chunks is to convert legacy POS systems into digital ones. This also involves the biggest investment by turning the old, big, bulk, heavy and expensive machine into a new, small, lite and cheap tablet. 

The system itself is running by apps available on IOS and Android based while the old one should run on windows based only and probably some of it is running under Linux system.

Old POS systems are based on client-server environments while the latest technologies already use a cloud as a server. With a cloud-based POS system, we are gaining a lot of advantages such as centralized and high availability data, scalable (fewer downtime issues), data backup mechanism and easy integration.

Centralize and High Availability Data

In the old POS system, data are stored in the local server while in the new and cloud-based POS system, all data goes and stored in the cloud-based database. This is mean that sales data are stored in one centralized and secured database with easiness to access all the time.

“Nowadays, we can put our sales data into one business intelligence application and do analysis for us and come up with the result so we can plan our future”

Scalable and Less Downtime Issue

One of the flexible features of a cloud-based POS system is that you can upscale your hardware specs or capacity in the cloud easily, anytime, fast and without any downtime. This is the challenge when the old system is in place, we need to replace or upgrade the server hardware with a new one and we need to turn off the hardware that causes interruption in the operations.

Data Backup Mechanism

With the data backup mechanism, we don’t have to count on people to do backup manually. One of the issues while using the old POS system is when the local servers are down due to a virus attack or hardware issue. With a cloud-based POS system, we don’t even have to worry about it anymore.

If one of our hardware failed then we are able to rest assured that our data is kept safely and automatically backed up every day. Even in the worst scenario if it’s the data coincidentally deleted by a virus attack then it can be restored anytime at the latest point.

Easy Integration

In the top paragraph, I mentioned how important the roles of POS systems are in the F&B Industry, This is mean with new cloud-based POS systems, we are easily able to integrate our POS system with other platform system available in the market. New cloud-based POS systems are able to integrate with ERP, CRM, Loyalty apps, etc. With sales data, business owners are capable to analyse customers' profile, behaviour and how much their power spending. Nowadays, we can put our sales data into one business intelligence application and do analysis for us and come up with the result so we can plan our future. Also, integrate with loyalty apps, business owners are able to provide benefits to the customer and at the same time provide rewards to them.

Converting our old legacy POS system into new and cloud-based POS systems is a beginning step in embracing the digital transformation within F&B industries.