One of the challenges with implementing a POS system in an older building such as the one at Ron Jillian's Ristorante & Pizzeria in Hampton, N.H., is the capital improvements that are often required to support the system]s internetworking requirements. Property owners are often faced with having to pay for new wiring infrastructure installations and/or upgrades to support the number, type or location of networked point-of-sale equipment.

Ron Jillian's has experienced steady growth with the current owners, and they've recently expanded the kitchen and dining area, moving into adjoining space within the leased property. Throughout the growth, both in their dine-in and take-out segments, the owners have managed the business using traditional ECRs. The owners felt they needed to better manage the continued growth, increase efficiency and implement greater controls. Therefore, it was decided that a cost-effective stepping stone from ECR into the world of point-of-sale, would offer the restaurant increased efficiency and controls to manage their growth and providing a price point that was important in today's economic climate using LIONWISE Lite, FEC AL8515 aluminum all-in-one terminals, Epson TM-U220 remote printers and Aboundi's ElectricConnect.

 

The team at LionWise partnered with Aboundi to use their line of ElectricConnect products to take advantage of the existing AC infrastructure currently in the building. In doing this, LionWise was able to provide a secure, 200MB/sec network to support the FEC AL8515 terminals and the Epson TM-U220 thermal printers in the kitchen and bar.

This solution provided the following improvements as it relates to overall operations:

-- Minimized the disruption to the business as we were able to utilize the existing AC wiring infrastructure (no need to drill or pull wire for those endpoints).

-- Decreased unwanted capital improvements to the facility (the ElectricConnect products plug into the existing wall sockets, they can be removed or relocated as needed).

 
-- The complete network was up and running in a few hours (no waiting for a wiring technicians to make the necessary infrastructure improvements, just plug and go).

One area of growing concern for Ron Jillian's with their continued use of the ECR was the close-out process each evening. With the increase in business volume, the owners were spending an average of 1 to 1.5 hours per evening balancing the daily receipts. With LIONWISE Lite, their nightly closing process went from a little over an hour to under 10 minutes. Also, with the addition of using Epson's TM-U200 for remote printing in the kitchen and bar, orders and pricing of their offerings are consistent, accurate and timely. The FEC all-in-one 15-inch touch screens allow a traditional ECR user to experience the benefit of an all-aluminum, 15-inch fanless touch screen terminal.

 

With the LIONWISE Lite, FEC, Epson and Aboundi bundle we are able to provide a cost-effective entry point to both the restaurant and retail POS market for those owners looking to grow beyond their ECR, but are not looking to invest in the cost of a traditional POS system.

 

LIONWISE Lite offers critical POS functionality such as the ability to update specials in real-time, multi-language support and single-station redundancy at a great price, while together the bundle represents a great value to the customer -- All-in-one FEC 15-inch fanless touchscreen, Epson printers and Aboundi's ElectricConnect to help power their way to profitability.

 

Using ESC-P and directly interfacing to Epson's line of products, configuring Lite to operate with a local or remote Epson printer is simple. No drivers to load, no Windows printers to configure -- just point and print.

FEC represents the POS touch screen hardware platform hosting the LIONWISE Lite point-of-sale application. Aboundi's ElectricConnect products are the network backbone interconnecting and hosting the TCP/IP communication between the touch screen terminals, printers and the Internet.

The Epson TM-U220B is participating as remote printers both in the kitchen and bar area. The printers themselves are connected to Aboundi's ElectricConnect products via a standard CAT5e patch cord. The Aboundi products are then interconnected to each other via the existing AC power outlets in building. Epson TMU220s were chosen for their performance and reliability as well as the durability to withstand the harsh environment in the kitchen, but also because the printer allows data and commands to be directly streamed to the remote device -- very fast, no need for drivers, Windows printers or print queues.