Centre forward

"We're making good, informed decisions based on good-quality management information," says Forte Posthouse catering and retail director Simon Crichton. "It's the first truly centralised estate management system in the UK."

That's all down to the new EPoS (electronic point of sale) system that Forte is using to vary product prices from till to till in Posthouse hotels around the country - all from its Luton headquarters. Colour touchscreens with options that change according to head office directions lie at the heart of the system, which is already installed in most of Forte's 80 or so hotels.

When Forte completes its roll-out operation - averaging 10 tills per hotel - it will be one of the biggest EPoS programmes in the leisure industry, with hotels such as the Grosvenor House and the Strand Palace boasting 20 and 30 such tills respectively.

Forte, Bass and Holiday Inns - and its Express franchisee Premier Hotels - are all taking up the head office control possibilities presented by price falls that have seen colour touchscreens fall from £4,000 two years ago to around £2,000 today, while swipe-card systems and card-based vending machines have become affordable enough for Premier to replace around 80% of each of Holiday Inn's cash transactions with card payments.

Forte's system shows just what can be done if the systems are backed up by a powerful network capable of polling each till and uploading its sales data.

"It gives us item sales, departmental sales at the end of day," says Crichton. "That is very powerful for inter-branch comparisons." Forte spent more than £5m on the Micros Fidelio system, which allows it to give incentives to staff if, for example, it finds the Heathrow Posthouse sells 20 pâté portions at lunchtimes, while Aylesbury is selling only 10.

The technology behind this system is known as TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). This is a language that networked computers can use to talk to each other. It allows different types of computers to communicate, making it easy to put in a till, vending machine or PC.

TCP/IP is set to bring cheap remote control to EPoS tills anywhere in this country. In doing so, it will make remote uploading and downloading of prices, takings, sales volume levels by time-slot, stock levels, stock ordering and stock delivery a cinch. A cheap cinch.

For swipe card-equipped hotel operators such as Premier, which uses vending machines in many of its newer Holiday Inn Express venues, network languages are already familiar. But more conventional hospitality operators are increasingly going to need to invest in the technology that allows their individual till systems to talk to head office.

TCP/IP has several advantages. First of all it is a standard language - the entire Internet speaks it.

Second is its immense flexibility. It was designed to cope with constantly changing numbers and locations of terminals. It is perfect for large-scale EPoS systems because adding new tills to the network simply involves plugging them in - TCP/IP will ensure that head office sees them and downloads daily pricing information or uploads takings for you.

Not only that, but TCP/IP will allow you to move a till machine to a different room - perhaps to cover a function you're hosting - and quietly pick up the connection with your till again.

TCP/IP was written to make the Internet atom bomb-proof, by coping with the constantly breaking network connections that nuclear war would bring. That's not to say you need the Internet to make TCP/IP work for your business network, but interest in the Internet is widening the range of those who are au fait with TCP/IP. And, given the high level of all things Internet in the USA, it is not surprising that many US companies are trying to sell it as part of EPoS systems.

There are two other advantages of TCP/IP that will ensure its place in the heart of a many a caterer's operation. One is that because it talks to each machine individually it is easy to send different pricing information to a single till or to tills in a region. Forte, for example, is able to price its Edinburgh drinks lower than those in London, despite sending different pricing information from the same Luton office.

Also, TCP/IP is becoming cheaper. Smaller operators could reap the same benefits as the likes of Forte. The increased demand driven by the Internet's growth is ensuring that TCP/IP networking facilities can be cheaply added to hospitality industry tills.

Hardware accounted for more than 30% of the price Forte paid for each of its tills. The cost of being able to talk to each till individually from Luton was a relatively small part of each till's final cost.

Centrally controlling EPoS tills is still mostly confined to big players such as Forte. The benefits of centralised control are not widely recognised, but suppliers sell the system on its cost-cutting advantages for gross margin improvement. It can also help increase margins by increasing sales, according to Ian McShane, business systems development manager for John Marston Taverners.

"We've had immediate benefits in margin that are driven by yield controls being advanced," says McShane. "The key benefit for us was in food, where we can measure between houses of the same type and measure the relative sales of starters and sweets, which allows us to offer staff incentives to increase sales. It gives us price flexibility while still maintaining control of our stock situation."

Marston asked computer firm Checkout to supply and set up its hardware but wrote its own program to run its centrally controlled EPoS, and uses ordinary phone lines to poll each of the 650 or so tills in its 245 pubs every night - an automatic operation that takes around 15 minutes per pub.

But Marston's £3.5m spend has brought it higher profits than it made from the system in gross margin savings - a welcome lesson that McShane feels leisure industry operators are not being sold. "Traditional EPoS thinking is to increase gross margin," he says. "But when you get into it you find you learn an awful lot about your customers and their spending patterns."

And the ability that gives you to increase profits by increasing sales could wind up being far more important than the gross margin saving you'll make.