Mosimann's plans point of sale update
Chi Man, financial controller at Mosimann's restauarant, London, won one of two £1,000 vouchers presented by Caterer& Hotelkeeper at HOTECH '94 last November. She can spend her voucher with any of the companies which exhibited at HOTECH, and she is now close to making her choice.
Man joined Mosimann's last year, after working elsewhere in retailing. Last November was her first trip to HOTECH, and she found it useful to be able to visit an exhibition "geared to our industry".
She took the opportunity to look at a number of systems which Mosimann's might install in the future. Food and beverage management and stock control systems, for example, will be in a later phase of IT development.
"Systems is a small but growing part of the job. We have some outside function business, and we need something to monitor this," Man says.
The priority, though, was to replace an old Remanco point of sale system. Man went to HOTECH '94 with a likely shortlist, which has since been refined to two: Remanco's Vision II system, and the Micros 2700 system.
Both systems have touchscreen user interfaces, and both will offer a bigger range of automated reports than the old Remanco system - but there the similarity ends.
Vision II is similar to the original Remanco system in that the point of sale devices are networked together and operate as "dumb" terminals controlled by a central computer (the fileserver).
Micros, on the other hand, has put a 486 processor into each of its terminals, so that each till is a self-contained PC as well as a terminal on the network.
"This means that if one of the terminals goes wrong, the whole system doesn't fall over - we can carry on using the others," says Man.
However, the Micros system as it is currently available in the UK is rather large and unattractive, says Man. There is an improved, streamlined version which will probably be available here later in the year. Meanwhile, Mosimann's has to make its decision.
Most of all, whichever system is chosen, Man is looking forward to the automated reports which a new point of sale system will offer.
"For example, there's the daily sales report that brings together the restaurant and the private dining rooms. That has to be done manually at the moment.
"We have a huge sales ledger now, and currently we have to type the information from every bill into a marketing information file. With a link between the point of sale and the membership system, this will happen automatically, and we'll be able to pull out the marketing information as we need it."
Another important factor will be the availability of communications interfaces. The administrative offices for Mosimann's are now in a separate building from the restaurant, and the management needs to be able to dial into the system.
At the end of the day, Mosimann's will be investing about £15,000 on its point of sale system - including the £1,000 contribution from Caterer & Hotelkeeper. "We just want a glorified till system, really," says Chi Man.
