NEC Point of Sale Roll Out on NEC (not) imminent

[NW cannonball]

... And one LSA complained that one crash also lost all of his sales records and inventory data from before, meaning he had to hand-count his remaining inventory and guesstimate his sales totals. Which meant, if he was off, he was personally responsible for paying the difference out of his own paycheck.

Sorry, but this sounds like an urban legend. What business would hold a salesman responsible for software crashes, especially during what must be a roll out period? If it is true, then that explains why customer service is not job one.

Not only that, but he would have to write down each sale to protect himself, thus defeating the purpose of the system.

Note: I wrote this before reading rrdude's post. His take on it rings true because I noticed the same thing when companies tried to introduce computerized production and inventory control back in the 80's.

What business would hold a salesman responsible for software crashes? Not a rational business that knew its software.

But - a few decades ago - a business that didn't know its software, had just bought a "POS" on the software salesman's (like used-car salesman only knows even less about the product and lies more convincingly to make up for the ignorance) sales story - when the business or the department or whoever just bought a multimillion POS -- that didn't work -- hey

Any such business would blame anybody but themselves - and they have and they did.

Now -- POS isn't a POS - it's a standard technology that customers and minimum-wage sales clerks (or whatever they are called now) all understand. And rational management must use to compete

The benefits are more than loss control and faster checkout -- those "reports" in real-time make it much cheaper and easier to for example -- restock trains (or Japanese 7-11's or whatever) in near real time.

This decade -- POS is old stuff and a zillion times cheaper both for hardware, software, and employee training than it was even a decade ago.

And could likely help Amtrak get closer to break-even on on-board sales.

Wouldn't that be nice.

 

[VentureForth]

Amtrak's total nationwide food inventory & cash flow is probably about the same as one Walmart store. POS is also a very good way to track sales over a variety of conditions, routes, etc. I don't think there is no place for POS in small businesses. Even sole proprietor restaurants use POS.

 

[PaulM]

Actually, the LSA is pretty accurate with the issues WHEN things go wrong, it is PITA. Especially when you have line of people, the POS quits working, you call Amtrak help desk to rectify problem and get phone message to leave name and number and someone will call you back WITHIN 24HOURS!

By urban legend, I was referring to holding the salesman responsible, certainly not that systems crash. The bit about nobody home at the help desk rings true as well.

 

[afigg]

Amtrak's total nationwide food inventory & cash flow is probably about the same as one Walmart store. POS is also a very good way to track sales over a variety of conditions, routes, etc. I don't think there is no place for POS in small businesses. Even sole proprietor restaurants use POS.

Ah, the things one can find out with Google. Found one website that states the average annual sales for a Walmart Supercenter is $72.5 million. Or was, as the webpage is not dated, but no reason to think that the number is out of date.
Amtrak food and beverage sales in FY2012 (from the FY12 financial statement) were $122.0 million. So Amtrak F&B sales are more than one Walmart Supercenter, but of course the Supercenter is selling many more higher margin items ranging from TVs to jewelry.

 

[rrdude]

What I'd REALLY like to see Amtrak utilize, is Wireless HandHeld devices in the diner. I showed it to them ten years ago, when we were using Toshiba, Motorola, Casio, etc., etc., PDA's.... But the cost then for those devices was high, the learning curve high(er), remember VERY FEW people were texting then, and wireless was too new a thing to make an EZ install.

Now, since the explosion of the iPod/iPhone, and the super EZ WiFi set up, (and reliability), and the fact that VIRTUALLY everyone texts to some degree, HandHelds have TAKEN OFF. Be it iPad, Mini, or Google Android, "Tablets" are here to stay in the hospitality world. My firm ported everything we had to offer over to iPad/Phone, and our sales of HandHeld s/w skyrocketed.

Imagine the diner service attendant coming to your table, asking the car, room number, and then typing in your order on a iPod/Phone/Mini? As soon as they hit "SEND" your order transmits below to either a flat screen or printer, abd the kitchen can start making your order.

What's the result? Faster table turns. (Assuming the kitchen can keep up, which SOMETIMES IS a problem) and far less time "accounting" at the end of each meal, as ALL the data is already entered, ONCE when the SA takes your order.

One can dream......

Here's a an old(er) video of how it works. We are no longer far from the only firm offering this, this tye of technolgy would be ideal in LD diners.

http://www.rmpos.com/wo/wopromovideo.html

 

[VentureForth]

Amtrak's total nationwide food inventory & cash flow is probably about the same as one Walmart store. POS is also a very good way to track sales over a variety of conditions, routes, etc. I don't think there is no place for POS in small businesses. Even sole proprietor restaurants use POS.

Ah, the things one can find out with Google. Found one website that states the average annual sales for a Walmart Supercenter is $72.5 million. Or was, as the webpage is not dated, but no reason to think that the number is out of date.
Amtrak food and beverage sales in FY2012 (from the FY12 financial statement) were $122.0 million. So Amtrak F&B sales are more than one Walmart Supercenter, but of course the Supercenter is selling many more higher margin items ranging from TVs to jewelry.

1.6 Walmarts.

 

[afigg]

Ah, the things one can find out with Google. Found one website that states the average annual sales for a Walmart Supercenter is $72.5 million. Or was, as the webpage is not dated, but no reason to think that the number is out of date.

Amtrak food and beverage sales in FY2012 (from the FY12 financial statement) were $122.0 million. So Amtrak F&B sales are more than one Walmart Supercenter, but of course the Supercenter is selling many more higher margin items ranging from TVs to jewelry.

1.6 Walmarts.

That's 1.6 Walmart Supercenters which have an average of around a whopping 200K square feet each. Which might be more square footage than there is in the NYP passenger concourse area, but I digress.
Another way to look at it as a food and beverage sales company with $122 million in sales. Easily enough to warrant a modern POS system for faster sales processing, better inventory management, more efficient operation. The FY2011 F&B sales were $109.4 million, so it was also a growing business with a 11.5% increase in sales in FY2012. Hope they are deploying a reliable and well designed POS system, not one subjected to funny business in who writes the RFP.

 

[afigg]

Now, since the explosion of the iPod/iPhone, and the super EZ WiFi set up, (and reliability), and the fact that VIRTUALLY everyone texts to some degree, HandHelds have TAKEN OFF. Be it iPad, Mini, or Google Android, "Tablets" are here to stay in the hospitality world. My firm ported everything we had to offer over to iPad/Phone, and our sales of HandHeld s/w skyrocketed.
Imagine the diner service attendant coming to your table, asking the car, room number, and then typing in your order on a iPod/Phone/Mini? As soon as they hit "SEND" your order transmits below to either a flat screen or printer, abd the kitchen can start making your order.

Not a bad idea. A 6" or 7" tablet with menus would be about the right size for taking and logging orders. I have heard about high end restaurants that used iPads for reservations and taking orders. I would expect that some restaurant chains are evaluating switching to tablets or have done so, but the price of the hardware has to come down as devices that portable are going to have a high loss rate in restaurant businesses with high employee turnover.
Amtrak is not a technology leader, so I doubt if they would adopt this concept in the near term. Get the POS systems into the diner cars and get the kinks out first.

 

[Bus Nut]

I generally make small-talk with the LSA in the cafe while riding both the Capitol Corridor and San Joaquin routes, and find that the reception to the new POS systems is mixed. Sure, it makes for a great deal less work as all the paper stock cards are pretty much history now, and end-of-day tallying is done by simply pushing a button and waiting for the print-out. However, if/when the system has an issue and crashes, it can take the cafe out of service by as much as 20 minutes waiting for everything to boot back up again. And one LSA complained that one crash also lost all of his sales records and inventory data from before, meaning he had to hand-count his remaining inventory and guesstimate his sales totals. Which meant, if he was off, he was personally responsible for paying the difference out of his own paycheck.

Did they get ripped by a vendor again? What kind of POS system would crash that often, and why wouldn't it be logging all the sales on a HD? Something doesn't sound right here, either the hardware or the config or maybe the employees were improperly trained.

I used a high volume POS in the 1990s that didn't lose data even if the power went out, and it ran on a normal piece of windows-compatible hardware.

If anything is going to crash it's credit cards--I thought they already had that? CC systems are flaky in my experience but usually they only choke on one transaction at a time.

 

[Bus Nut]

Amtrak's total nationwide food inventory & cash flow is probably about the same as one Walmart store. POS is also a very good way to track sales over a variety of conditions, routes, etc. I don't think there is no place for POS in small businesses. Even sole proprietor restaurants use POS.

Exactly. POS is actually very important to the profitability of these businesses. Also, anybody who has seen the kind of reporting Amtrak employees must go through for cash sales would appreciate the value of a computerized system. It could facilitate better inventory management, ie not running out of that food you like. There are a lot of advantages.

As to the theft thing, I've heard the rumors. If employees are still buying their own chips and selling them for cash, the POS isn't really going to fix that.

It WILL fix that common gripe that the cafe car closes too soon because end-of-day will be a snap. My understanding from reading PIPs is they don't give crew overtime pay to tally stuff out when they arrive in Chicago, which is why they close down food service and start doing paperwork.

 

[rrdude]

So any update anyone can give, system-wide?

This video is four years old. but new to me... "POS-TV" Who knew?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6aySOKsDTs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRbP_9YNImw

 

[Acela150]

I know that some AE sets have them. I'll be riding a Regional train in a few weekends shortly and I'll see if they are running POS yet.

 

[dlagrua]

All national food chains use elaborate POS systems. I understand that McDonalds system can take a tally that accounts for every single item sold, the paper goods, receipts and available inventory. They can tell exactly how much food and drink is being taken without going through the system.

In the case of Amtrak they did and possibly still do have a problem with theft. You are supposed to be entitled to two sodas with each meal , Did you ever wonder who might take the leftover stock? We were offered a second soda only once. Years back they gave out chocolates with desert. I only recall receiving them on two trips out of the dozens that we took. What happened to them? I have nothing against the crew getting a meal but when and if they steal a big quality of provisions it is a problem and it may be costing Amtrak millions. .

 

[OBS]

There are no POS systems on regionals in NEC. They are used on SWC in the lounge, on some California service, and the Acela's. There were some "new" POS tablets, that incorporate the credit card purchases, that were supposed to be rolled out over a year ago (everyone was sent to training classes) but they never showed up. Rumor has it that the credit card portion needed to have some security enhancements...

 

[CHamilton]

We were told at the last NARP meeting that the POS systems were delayed, as OBS said, for security upgrades. Apparently the TJMaxx data breach made a lot of companies redo the way they handle credit cards. And by this fall, all US cards will be required to have chips, so the card readers will need to change.

 

[Triley]

There are no POS systems on regionals in NEC. They are used on SWC in the lounge, on some California service, and the Acela's. There were some "new" POS tablets, that incorporate the credit card purchases, that were supposed to be rolled out over a year ago (everyone was sent to training classes) but they never showed up. Rumor has it that the credit card portion needed to have some security enhancements...

That's more or less what I was told during training. It's worth noting that during classroom training for the POS, we were only trained on the new POS, not the old. There's not too many differences, other than the passenger needing to retain their receipt in order to process a return/refund/exchange, there apparently a possibility of being able to scan the barcode on products to sell them, as opposed to digging through the on-screen menu. Not sure how true that was. There are a few things about it I personally didn't like, as they actually make things more difficult to accomplish, but oh well.

 

[neroden]

Honestly, the whole chip-in-card thing is going nowhere, given that most cards are used online (where there's no way to check the chip). Hopefully the POS system will go in to the rest of Amtrak sometime soon; the inventory tracking, and keeping the cafe OPEN all trip, is far more important than the credit card handling.

 

[Triley]

Honestly, the whole chip-in-card thing is going nowhere, given that most cards are used online (where there's no way to check the chip). Hopefully the POS system will go in to the rest of Amtrak sometime soon; the inventory tracking, and keeping the cafe OPEN all trip, is far more important than the credit card handling.

If it's going nowhere, why has the rest of the world been using it for so long, and been improving on it? For example, the UK has had it since 2004. And yes cards are mostly used online now, but coming from a retail background, I can tell you that we had stolen cards used at several stores in the mall. It still does happen!

Back to the main point, I hope you're not thinking that the chip-and-pin technology is what is holding the POS systems up? If chip-and-pin was the issue, then they would probably just nix the thought of credit cards being ran through the POS, and get new credit card machines that have the chip-and-pin capability. In Canada even your pizza delivery person has portable credit card machines that are chip-and-pin enabled. (And believe me, the total is so expensive that you will need that machine!)

 

[Guest]

Chips will not be required, however on October 1st there will be a liability shift.

If a merchant that does not support chips accepts a chip card via the magnetic stripe than the merchant will be liable if the transaction was fraudulent.

http://usa.visa.com/merchants/grow-your-business/payment-technologies/credit-card-chip/liability-shift.jsp

 

[rrdude]

I can def see that chip-n-pin would delay it, if the vendor did not have that factored in. As of this October, if the merchant doesn't accept the "new" cards, then any chargebacks are the responsibility of the merchant, NOT the card issuer or the card brand.

Like any major change, (and the USA is so far behind in EMV and Chip-N-Pin, it's laughable) it's going to take quite some time for the merchants to adopt the "new". Until they are hit, and must absorb that is, a few big chargebacks.

Chains are all "on board" as a $50 or $60 chargeback, multiplied by 100, 200, or 500 restaurants, all of a sudden becomes "real money".

And, sadly, Amtrak is literally light-years behind in POS implementation. I've posted in detail in the past the money / product that Amtrak has wasted / been stolen over the years. And anyone who has ever been to any QSR or chains table-service restaurant operation knows the benefits of having a POS in place. Amtrak has certainly tried, and the California Amtrak project seems to be the most advanced implementation.

But until the POS is in place in every cafe car, and in every diner and SSL, the total benefits cannot be enjoyed by Amtrak.

Again, as posted before, if Amtrak doesn't roll-out tablets for the wait staff in the diners, they will just be installing a product that upon installation, will already be at least five years behind in technology. The industry has moved to tablets or devices, at table side, far faster than those of us in the industry and the other pundits who like to pontificate about such things, ever thought.

I'll be taking the Cap to the NRA show again in May (NOT the gun show) probably for my 25th or 26th time, and I expect to see even more of the BYOD services than ever before. (Customer Brings Your Own Device) while I doubt Amtrak will implement that, you all will be seeing more and more of that in the future. Not so sure?

When you went to Starbucks last time, ask yourself, how did you pay?

 

[neroden]

The key benefits for Amtrak of POS are order tracking and inventory tracking; the payment stuff is not the main benefit. I really hope Amtrak does implement tableside/tablet order entry ASAP.

Last time I went to Starbucks I paid cash.

 

[afigg]

Appears that Amtrak is starting the POS system replacement process all over again. There is an RFP for the Next GEN POS (Sourcing Event) listing* on the Amtrak procurement site. The Response is only open until March 8, 2016 so it may be taken down in a few days. There is a 13 MB zip file of documents on the non-construction procurement entry that I have not looked at yet.

Gist of the details entry:

REQUEST FOR PROPOSAL * Next Gen Point of Sale (POS) System * RFP#Doc681764 * Description: Services to be provided involve the installation of a Point of Sale (POS) system in Amtrak’s food and beverage café cars. The standard turn-key POS system will be used on board trains in Amtrak's food and beverage café cars, at management facilities (such as Crew Bases and Commissaries), and in support and maintenance facilities. * Amtrak will accept proposals for the following procurement until 2:00 PM Eastern Time on the closing date stated below: * RFP Closing Date: March 31, 2016 *

So how many more years will it be before the cafe cars and diner cars get modern integrated POS systems? If the winner of the RFP has to start from scratch, even with an existing system that can be reconfigured, it could be 2 or 3 years.

* edit: changed link to front page on Amtrak procurement portal as the direct link to the listing is not working. Select non-construction and look for the Next Gen POS entry (until it is taken down). ell, if the link works at all.

 

[PRR 60]

Titled edited to reflect the sad reality (and to eliminate confusion over the abbreviation, "POS").

 

[Train2104]

I assume the LD "cash registers" were just an interim upgrade, then?

EDIT: I just saw the cafe car only line in the RFP doc.

 

[afigg]

Titled edited to reflect the sad reality (and to eliminate confusion over the abbreviation, "POS").

Good idea. I tend to think of another meaning for POS when I see the acronym. And I don't mean Positively Outstanding Service, because that is not something often associated with Amtrak.
Reading the statement of work document included in the attached zip file, the RFP is focused on cafe and lounge cars, not diner cars (for now). Quote:

While Amtrak provides a sit-down restaurant service with freshly prepared meals on many of its long distance routes, the focus of this solicitation will be the acquisition of a Point of Sale system to serve corridor cafés and long distance snack coach/lounge services (collectively referred to as cafés from this point forward).

and this:

1.2.1.1 Café Technology Vision

Amtrak has a long term vision for using technology to provide customers with a more convenient experience when accessing the food and beverage items they desire. This could take the form of a customer ordering a snack from the comfort of their seat using their Amtrak mobile app and paying by credit card through the app, with an attendant then bringing their order to them without having to leave their seat.

Amtrak is already considering the next generation of café cars for its corridor services where self-service models may become standard. Part of that vision includes a self-service check-out scanner that the LSA can turn on/off as a line-busting' option, as is commonly seen in grocery stores today.

Amtraks vision also anticipates moving to a cashless environment. As Amtrak provides service to the entire community including those without access to credit cards, the inconvenience and hardship of not being able to purchase food on a train journey of several days must be considered and managed. Using technology to provide cash-paying customers with the means to convert their cash to an electronic form of payment for food purchases is an area of long-term interest to Amtrak. This could be achieved through the use of POS technology to enable activations of prepaid debit cards, limiting the scope of cash handling on board. Passengers may have the opportunity to purchase the prepaid cards either at the stations or at any merchant offering such products.

While consideration will be given to a technology product and Contractors capacity to support innovative use cases in the future, Amtrak's immediate priority is to deploy, as expeditiously as possible, a system that efficiently supports the current business model.

While POS systems for Amtrak dining cars are not part of this acquisition, Amtrak will look at the potential for the proposed solution to scale and adapt to the dining car business model.

Amtrak really wants to minimize the OBS handling of cash. One way to accomplish this for passengers w/o credit or debit cards (or don't want to use their cards for small purchases) would be to have a machine take the cash and issue prepaid cards.