Purchasing the Right POS System
Since its commercial launch in America 100 years ago, the pizza industry has enjoyed dramatic advances in the equipment invented to help operators improve their businesses. The planetary mixer, the conveyor oven and the dough sheeter are just a few machines that primed pizza for the ultimate in customer service, delivery, which arrived in the 1950s.
But while operators mastered great food and service, many knew they could improve as business managers. An MBA has never been necessary for the task, but the devil in the details of food and labor cost management has proven a demon indeed. The math behind the madness is simple, but time consuming, and staying ahead of the paperwork has always been challenging.
Advances in cash registers during the 1960s and '70s helped by providing an accurate total of each day's sales. But it wasn't until NCR and IBM merged registers with computers around 1980 that the machines began tracking items sold as well. That change triggered the slow transition away from tedious paper filing systems to storing information on computers for quick retrieval, and that marked the dawn of the modern point-of-sale machine. Not only could it track sales, it charted sales trends and stored the operation's customer database. By the 1990s, POS systems were scheduling labor and tracking food cost and inventory.
In 2005, POS systems are technological marvels that report current activity while forecasting future sales. Training employees to use them is a breeze and they make ordinary operators look like marketing geniuses and Wharton grads.
Wondering whether a POS would improve your business? Keep on reading, for you'll find plenty of answers to that question. And if you're in the market for a POS upgrade, there's plenty here for you to learn, too. What was a great system 10 years ago is a dinosaur now, so read further to see what's new.
PizzaMarketplace would like to thank FireFly Technologies, a POS provider to the pizza industry, which sponsored this guide. Their generosity brings this guide to you at no cost.
Steve Coomes, Senior Editor
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