End Your POS Terminal Maintenance Woes

Whether your store operates with one POS terminal or many, surely you understand the chaos that ensues when a terminal is rendered inoperable. If you operate your store with just one terminal, during downtime your sales associates must manually conduct and track transactions — a process rife with inefficiencies. During downtime, you must also scramble to contact the product vendor's technical support team or sic your own IT team on the problem. But what if the product vendor's support team is slow to react to the problem and its services are cost prohibitive? What if your IT team is incapable of working on the hardware because it is extremely complex? Retailer Teavana faced these very issues and therefore needed to replace its POS terminals with models that required minimal IT intervention.

POS Terminal Downtime = Lost Sales
Headquartered in Atlanta with 100 brick-and-mortar locations throughout the United States and Mexico, Teavana is part tea bar, part tea emporium. For years, the retailer operated one brand of POS terminals throughout its enterprise. Yet, Mike Wallace, controller and VP of IT, and David Eshelman, IT manager at Teavana, experienced costly maintenance and repair problems with the retailer's POS terminals one store per week across the chain. Indeed, Teavana's IT team found the POS terminals unable to be repaired because their casings were difficult to open. "I got the impression the vendor did not want us to do any repairs ourselves because the casing was so difficult to open," says Wallace. "In fact, we couldn't even open the terminals, so there was no quick fix for even small problems such as driver issues." For example, if the motherboard died, the vendor's technician had to travel to the store to repair it. The repair process took up to two days because the technician often had to order parts after he surveyed the problem, meaning he'd have to return the next day to replace that part. Eshelman recalls instances where it took the vendor seven days to repair a terminal. "Our locations operate one POS system per store," says Eshelman. "Therefore, critical problems occurred when a terminal went down because sales associates had to track transactions with a pen and paper. I cannot quantify the exact number of sales lost during downtimes, but I can confidently state we lost sales. During downtime, each transaction takes much longer, and more mistakes are made because sales associates have to manually calculate sales. We felt helpless when a cash register went down."

Avoid Limited Processor Speed
In addition to repair issues, the POS terminals caused other problems for Teavana's IT staff. The terminals operated on a 2.0 GHz (gigahertz) Celeron processor, which posed a problem for the retailer's POS software application, Celerant Command Retail. The POS terminals could not handle the speed of Command Retail. "The limited processor size slowed transaction times and report generation," says Eshelman. If the retailer kept the existing POS terminals, they would be forced to upgrade the RAM on each machine in every store to accommodate the POS software. Purchasing new RAM meant hiring a technician at nearly $600 per store to upgrade each machine. In fact, the retailer had already upgraded the terminal's RAM in a few stores, and the POS software still could not perform properly.

Determined to increase efficiency and save time and money on maintenance costs, Eshelman researched POS terminals. After testing a few products, Wallace and Eshelman chose DigiPoS Retail Blade 3 (RB3) because of its modular architecture and dual hard drive design. The Retail Blade is available as a family of processors, ranging from Retail Blade 2 (RB2) through Retail Blade 7 (RB7). The numbers reference the different types of processors available. The Retail Blade consists of two parts — the blade and the host. The blade consists of three removable components — an external power supply, a hard drive, and a processor. The host is a group of "passive" devices, such as the fan, which houses the blade's components. The Retail Blade host is the static part of the system, which provides the connectivity and power management to all the devices. It remains in place while the blade (i.e. the motherboard) and hard drive slide in and out for easy upgrades, without having to remove cables or use tools. This allows various blades to be swapped in and out, such as upgrading from an RB2 to a higher processing RB7. Only the blade has to be replaced, as the host remains in place, eliminating the need to rip and replace the entire system.

Repair Hard Drive, Processor, Power Supply With First Aid Kit
In addition to the RB3, the retailer also purchased a First Aid Kit, which includes fully functional replacements of the blade's components (see sidebar below). If one or all of the blade's components breaks, the retailer can open the host's casing and replace the damaged components with the corresponding components from the First Aid Kit. "If something is wrong with the hardware, whether you can diagnose it or not, you simply replace the blade components with components from the First Aid Kit," says Wallace. "All we have to do is slide out the existing unit, slide in the new unit, and fire up the machine. We now have a fully functional POS system that does not require IT or vendor intervention." If the host breaks down, DigiPoS must repair the issue. When swapping blades, the peripherals are left alone. Teavana purchased several peripherals including 15-inch DigiPoS touch monitors, DigiPoS optical wheel mice, Epson TM88 thermal printers, Datalogic Quickscan Mobile scanners, and Heritage cash drawers.

Once the RB3s were purchased, enterprisewide installation took place over nine months. The DigiPoS units were shipped to Teavana's warehouse, where an IT member assembled all components into individual "kits" (i.e. monitor, keyboard, mouse, cash drawer, and scanner). The hard drives were not included in the kits, as they were shipped to headquarters to be loaded with the Windows XP operating system and Command Retail. "Usually a technician would take the configured hard drives with him on the plane or ship them overnight to the store," says Wallace. "One of our technicians traveled to as many store locations as possible to install the units. We hired two contractors to install units in the stores our technician was unable to visit."

To date, each Teavana location operates one DigiPoS RB3. Based on historical service repair costs, Wallace reports that the retailer is saving $2,000 per RB3 unit, or $200,000 enterprisewide, compared to the original terminals. Sales transaction and report generation speed has increased by 50%. Also, the RB3 runs the latest version of Command Retail. "If Celerant develops a new version of its software that the RB3 cannot handle, we can simply purchase a higher-level blade," says Eshelman. "We don't have to purchase new terminals all over again. We can take out the RB3 and slide in the blade that can handle the software." Finally, the retailer is pleased with its upgrade from a 2.0 GHz Celeron processor to a 2.4 GHz processor. Also the dual hard drives have increased performance by offloading database operations to its own drive.

On The Web: Russell's c-stores decreased transaction time by upgrading its POS, at ismretail.com/jp/7494.

In an industry where securing the loyalty of the most profitable customers is increasingly the name of the game, it's important to avoid faulty terminals. Such avoidance is important not only from a cost standpoint but from a consumer impression standpoint, since these terminals and their functionality add to the customer's perception of your store.