Casino Enterprise Management

Just 10 years ago, writing a check at the grocery store, paying for dinner with cash, pre-paying inside the gas station, or placing a catalog order over the phone were no-second-thought transactions. How quaint. Today we’re swiping our debit and credit cards anywhere and everywhere, paying at the pump, and clicking “proceed to checkout”—and grumbling to ourselves when the coupon printer at the register doesn’t spit out a reward. The way we order and pay for everyday (and not so everyday) goods and services has profoundly changed in the past decade and, along with it, our expectations about customer service and customization at the point of sale. Just as today’s slot patrons wouldn’t dream of sitting around waiting for a change girl, today’s consumers expect instantaneous and intimate service with every transaction, be it restaurant, retail or whatever. According to Tina Stehle, senior vice president and general manager of Agilysys Hospitality Solutions Group, guest confidence is often created—or destroyed—at the point of sale. “An ineffective POS solution can actually obstruct guest service and prevent hospitality venues from reaching revenue goals,” she said. “A reliable and feature-rich POS solution, on the other hand, can drive profitability and enhance guest service.”

Ed Chapel, Vice President of the Casino Division at MICROS Systems Inc., agrees that POS is no longer simply “a nice feature” to have in a gaming site but a revenue-maximizing requirement. “It extends the capabilities of gaming system player preferences throughout the gaming organization,” he explained. “Player-tracking data is then shared with food & beverage and retail outlets to provide management a better profile of where and what a player is spending in those profit centers. By understanding the player profile, companies can now share data across enterprise organizations, and market to those preferences reducing costs and increasing profits. This also allows gaming organizations to extend discounts and marketing campaigns to different tiers of players, and issue rewards and discounts based on both the level of gaming play, and the non-gaming spend.”

Agilysys and MICROS both offer POS solutions tailored specifically for the gaming and hospitality industry, each with unique features that were designed to increase cross-selling capabilities, marketing opportunities and, of course, guest satisfaction.

Agilysys—InfoGenesis™ POS
According to Stehle, the most important quality of any point-of-sale solution is reliability. “Customers need to be able to rely on the system’s security, performance and reporting integrity,” she explained. “They want solutions that enable them to limit liability against fraud and that provide reliable business intelligence that empowers them to find ways to increase revenues and reduce expenses. Also high on the list is flexibility. Customers want systems that offer a variety of features and functionality in one application that can be used in a variety of operating scenarios.”

InfoGenesis™ POS by Agilysys was designed with these qualities in mind—and with the ultimate goal of providing users a competitive edge through scalable architecture, flexible configuration and superior integration capabilities. “With InfoGenesis POS, customers can add additional terminals without having to build out expensive infrastructure, enabling data to flow seamlessly from one application to the next,” Stehle said. “Downtime worries are also eliminated, because the software’s unmatched offline capabilities allow customers to sync up data as soon as network connections are reestablished.”

Stehle also noted that, because one of the primary benefits of an enterprise-level point-of-sale solution is better system reporting, the breadth of reporting in InfoGenesis POS sets it apart, enabling users to review guest spending patterns, cut costs and plan for the future more effectively. “The solution’s ability to interface with other software solutions, such as property management systems and inventory & procurement systems, enables customers to understand their guests and identify items that drive profitability,” she added. “InfoGenesis POS gives users a true picture of the business with data that can be leveraged to enhance revenues and provide more personalized guest service.”

Hallmark features of InfoGenesis POS include sorting, filtering and grouping options that allow staff to locate information quickly and easily, create custom reports and create convenient links to those reports; real-time reporting capabilities that enable customers to create personalized reports and review guest spending patterns; organizational controls that allow staff to monitor configuration changes in the system; and certification by the PCI standards organization as Payment Application Data Security Standards compliant, which ensures the security of sensitive payment card data. InfoGenesis POS also has some surprising capabilities, including a loyalty application that rewards guests for food and beverage purchases. The application allows guests to earn points for purchases, which can be redeemed for free meals, discounts on future purchases or other rewards. It runs as a hosted application with a user interface for configuring various types of promotions and interacts with the host to record transaction activity and offer rewards. Loyalty cards, which are issued to guests, are linked to spending accounts that can be used to pay for purchases. “Hospitality customers are increasingly seeking ways to add value to their offerings and provide a more unique guest experience,” Stehle noted. “InfoGenesis POS with loyalty functionality delivers a solution that enables customers to offer exciting new dining options, reward specific purchasing behavior and provide tangible benefits to guests.”

The tangible benefits to the operator, on the other hand, come down to very real, very realizable ROI. “Across the board, food & beverage operations of all sizes realize a high ROI when they invest in a full-featured POS software solution,” Stehle said. “We are seeing even the smallest F&B establishments realize a quick ROI when they replace manual processes and electronic cash registers with InfoGenesis POS. Often, smaller operations use an Application Service Provision (ASP), which is an effective alternative to managing and supporting a server infrastructure on the premises. That kind of flexibility is one of the most appealing features of InfoGenesis POS.”

Stehle noted that Agilysys’ hospitality solutions have a long history and strong presence in the gaming industry and that InfoGenesis POS was designed specifically with hospitality customers in mind. And, with InfoGenesis POS implemented at more than 500 businesses in more than 40 countries, including hotels, casinos, resorts, restaurants, cruise ships, stadiums and managed foodservice facilities, Stehle is happy to report that customer feedback is overwhelmingly positive. “Users frequently state that InfoGenesis POS is accessible, flexible and powerful,” she said. “Customers also comment on the solution’s features and functionality, particularly the reporting tools, as well as its ability to integrate seamlessly with other software solutions.”

MICROS—Simphony™
According to Chapel, MICROS gauges the success of its POS system by its acceptance within the industry, the feedback the company gets from the business community, and its market penetration. That, he says, is what keeps MICROS as the leading POS provider in the world. “The extensibility of MICROS solutions traverses both time zones and continents for our enterprise customers on a single platform,” he said. “This true enterprise architecture allows our product to scale up and out in terms of size, with minimal or no impact to customer service. MICROS solutions are installed in over 400 casinos around the world.”

Each of those MICROS solutions, Chapel said, is designed to simplify operations and remove manual processes. “MICROS offers mature POS solutions that allow casino personnel to focus on the customer service model,” he added. “MICROS provides superior technical solutions that are reliable, offer a proven feature set, and coupled with tight integration amongst other vendors and feature-rich in reporting capabilities, allow management teams to make immediate actionable decisions on current information.”
Of all its solutions, SimphonyTM is MICROS’s first enterprise, service-oriented architecture (SOA) point-of-sale (POS) hospitality product. According to Chapel, SOA allows organizations to deploy the hosted POS system using a design that provides flexibility, resiliency and streamlined integration of applications, and Simphony was designed for deployment into diverse environments to deliver the complex, mission-critical functions that most innovative customers demand. “It is capable of providing enterprise-level integration into corporate systems and eliminates the need to maintain property-based [solutions],” he said.

Thanks to the layers of resiliency MICROS has built and the operating efficiencies the company has created, Chapel said Simphony “has the ability to tie into the entire guest stay, including the hotel system, player tracking and comps.” In other words, it can handle the points-of-service across the entire enterprise—restaurants, food courts, gaming floor, retail, etc.—using a single system.

Of course, this property-level of integration isn’t the only compelling aspect of the system. According to Chapel, Simphony (and its ROI) really shines on a large scale, due to its reduced onsite hardware footprint and its flexibility to grow with an enterprise as it expands. “Although Simphony may be implemented at a single property, the true value can be found in its ability to scale to a business with thousands of workstations which require little maintenance, spread over many properties,” he explained. “This solution can be hosted using one of MICROS’s four worldwide datacenters, or it can be self-hosted by a customer, eliminating the need for onsite servers and the IT staff required to maintain those servers. Simphony operates on clustered or load balancing servers, which allows the solution to run on many smaller, inexpensive servers instead of one or two large servers. This promotes easier system growth, as you are not required to purchase large, expensive servers upfront. You can start with what you need and add to it as required.”

The hosted POS Simphony Enterprise Suite includes enhanced retail functionality, e-business solutions integration, tiered pricing, paperless kitchen solutions, kiosk, enterprise maintenance, property maintenance, handheld support, gift card support and credit card support. It also provides sales and cost reporting capabilities via the web-based mymicros.net solution and interfaces to peripheral equipment and software, including property management systems, liquor dispensing systems, customer loyalty systems and stored value cards, digital signage, and table management systems.

With so many functions tied to a single system, downtime might have been a concern, but with Simphony, downtime is a thing of the past, as the POS solution offers strong offline functionality at the workstation level, within the revenue center and at the property level, allowing operations to continue almost unhindered during server maintenance. Better yet, the Enterprise Management Console allows for management of the entire system from within a single application. “Users are able to create and define the parameters of the enterprise, properties and revenue centers from any PC that has access to the central server, thus allowing local users to make changes to their configuration if necessary,” Chapel explained.

MICROS is also pleased to offer its industry-leading hardware solutions to the casino market. “The MICROS Workstation 5 is an embedded windows appliance that offers a very low-total cost of ownership,” Chapel said. “The use of flash memory and passive cooling reduces the risk of costly mechanical failures and greatly improves system reliability and uptime. This solid state device is thin client and virus free.”

What Next for POS?
Despite the differences in Agilysys’ and MICROS’s current product offerings and POS solutions, Stehle and Chapel agree that POS systems 10 years from now would likely seem as foreign to us today as TITO did in 1999. According to Chapel, the future of POS will be “a more mobile, customer-facing and interactive solution, with business intelligence from an actionable standpoint, as well as some artificial intelligence that allows the POS to help recommend and guide customers toward purchasing decisions, based on historical purchases or trends that similar purchasers have made.”

“This new type of system will allow the purveyor to spend a lot more time with the guest and create focus on creating more personal connections and growing relationships with their customers,” he added. “Furthermore, POS will be more tightly tied into content delivery vehicles used by the advertising and marketing branches of the company. Menu item sales tied into customer loyalty systems will drive mobile couponing via email and text messaging campaigns. Menu item data will be served up onto digital menu and marketing boards that share space with advertising—both in the store and on the property. The menu information will also be shared out to online sources as well for web ordering and information regarding what can be purchased in the store. MICROS is beginning to demonstrate many of these features today.”

Meanwhile, Stehle predicts that many POS functions will be much less visible to guests. “In counter service locations, for example, guests will likely be able to place orders and make payments using their own PDAs,” she said. “In casual table service locations, at-the-table systems—such as those being enabled by Microsoft Surface™—will allow guests to place complicated orders and make payments at their discretion. In fine dining environments, new levels of mobile technology will enhance the level of service offered to guests without deterring from personal interaction with staff. And behind the scenes, POS systems will be capable of gathering more data and offering a greater level of business intelligence.”
“Within 10 years, new standards of managing the guest experience will be expected,” she added. “Guest preferences will need to be known in advance, and guests will need to be rewarded for their loyalty without having to ask. A greater level of intelligence about guests and their spending patterns will enable more targeted ways of promoting services.”

Both Agilysys and MICROS are working hard to ensure that these visions of the future become a reality. At Agilysys, Stehle reports that the InfoGenesis POS team already has an initiative to support iPhone and other PDA apps, and research on Microsoft Surface applications is also in progress. “Mobile order-taking applications are continuously being improved,” she said. “With each new version of the POS application, more data is being made available for consumption by the Agilysys Analytics system. A new loyalty application has been developed and deployed, and there are plans to continue to expand on the power of this platform.”

Likewise, MICROS is also taking strategic steps to ensure the company’s products remain on the cutting edge of R&D. “As the largest POS provider in the world, we start first by employing world class people to help drive both technological and creative designs into our current and next generation products,” Chapel explained. “We utilize a steering committee made up of industry leaders that help drive our technology decisions and customer requests. We utilize industry standard development methodologies that ease the migration from current to forefront cutting edge initiatives. And we continue to invest in R&D—well over $100 million spent over the past three years—to ensure our solutions are reliable, innovative and capable of fitting the needs of our customers of today and tomorrow.”

No matter what the future brings, one thing will remain constant: the focus on speed, accuracy and convenience from the customer’s perspective at the point of sale. Because some things never change, and satisfied customers being profitable customers is one of them.

Mary Huyck is the Senior Associate Editor at Casino Enterprise Management. She can be reached at (701) 293-7775 or editor5[at]aceme.org.