Upgrading your POS system without upgrading your printers can lead to trouble.

Fooodservice Equipment & Supplies - July 2006

Jonathan Schwarz
Founder and Co-Owner Stone Hearth Pizza Belmont, Mass.

Do you ever wonder why so many trendy, must-see local restaurants that serve a delectable menu sadly end up on the scrap heap of flamed-out operations? The all-too-obvious answer to these inauspicious endings is the failure of the owners to weigh equally the importance of a keen business sense with their sophisticated knowledge of food.

While meticulously going over the freshest picks for "daily specials" is important, far too many foodservice operators fail to recognize that the business ingredients of their venture contribute as much, if not more, to the “experience” of dining at their establishment.

Neighbors and friends, Chris Robbins and I were looking to break away from corporate America. We also saw a void in the restaurant choices for our families. These factors added up to the makings of Stone Hearth Pizza.

Chris and I successfully raised enough capital to open our first two Stone Hearth Pizza locations in Belmont, Mass., in August 2005 and nine months later another in Sudbury, Mass.

Regardless of the industry segment a concept serves, any diner has two critical moments in their experience: how quickly the food arrives once it is ordered; and how quickly the check arrives once the customer is ready to leave. A restaurant’s failure in either of these areas sours the customer’s experience.

A major factor contributing to the success of these two important operational flows and the customer’s perception is the quality of the POS system and, consequently, the printer. We discovered the ultimate importance of this mutually dependent relationship the hard way.

Too often a POS transaction system was too "pizza-parlor" focused and was not specifically geared toward servicing the higher end, casual-dining restaurant. There were a number of factors that contributed to Stone Hearth’s frustrations with our POS system. Included among these was the inability to split credit cards or integrate into the backend system for inventory management.

These issues led to increased customer frustrations and contributed mightily to our decision to upgrade after only seven months of operation. In a service operation, there is nothing more alarming than frustrating your customers due to preventable technology issues.

Chris and I knew our POS system was eating away at profits and needed to be trashed.

The main problem was our POS system did not automatically integrate with Stone Hearth’s current printers. So naturally, our POS vendor proposed an interim solution.

But, as luck would have it, the interim printers did not meet our requirements on several levels. They were more vulnerable to heat and spills, did not give an audible signal when processing an order and the thermal paper was expensive and inconvenient in the kitchen due to its sensitivity to heat.

So, we asked our value-added reseller to incorporate our existing inkjet printers with a new POS system into our operation. Doing so helped us balance the needs of our food enterprise with the pressing needs of our business environment.

The weaknesses in our initial POS technology were evident very early on but we lived with them for five months before beginning our due diligence for a new system. It took us five weeks to assemble a short list of systems based on our business needs. Once we decided on the right system, it took another three weeks to collect our detailed profile data, program the system, install and train.

With our new POS system in place, we could now easily integrate with our current printers and provide a completely seamless dining experience to our customers. The not-so-trivial issues of not being able to split a check as well as seamless integration with a gift and loyalty card program were put behind us.

Finding the proper balance between the all-encompassing obsession with food/dining quality was a challenging but crucial step to ensuring the economic performance of our business.